More of the wonderful Neto!

This man is bonkers!! His work is illusive and beautiful, I want to BE there and STAY there!

A new generation of art!

A new system of people watching! What I think it great about this kind of art is observing how members of the public deal or react to it.

Curator comments ont he movement towards "Defining the art work by the presence of the visitor or spectator"

What is sculpture? How does scultpure function?

So for you - what is art? Is this art??

I would argue that this may be the most explorative type of art. It explores society and culture and opens up the mind to endless possiblities. This is the struggle to revert humans to the nature of PLAY.

It takes a certain type of personality to try this kind of thing out! Lighten up, play out - bring it on!

Would snow make a good sculpture?

DEFINITELY!

Skeletal



Delicate



DEEP



cOlOUrfuL!



Untouched



O the possibilities...

Harrogate Knit and Stitching Show!

My 4th time at the Knit and Stitch in Harrogate! This year was especially good for scrap fabrics and the usual craft materials!  As exciting and festive as ever! See pictures: !









Jane McKeating - Boy on a bike




Lynn Setterington - Passing down tree of life
This appliquéd hanging was not your typical depiction of your family tree! It is layered with personal quotes, memories and childlike dialogue, surrounded by amusing genealogical graphs.







Joanna Teague's stitched textiles continued to appeal to my love of narrative and tactility.

She deals with themes of the family, of values, advice and personal/societal phrases. In her work, she uses poetry and dialogue stitched in red against white/cream cotton backgrounds. The old cotton adds to the nature of past & memory and gives each piece a delicate essence. The red thread was said to be used to relate back to old washing labels on clothes.

Her embroidered baby dress is a great commentary on all the advice that new mothers are given both when the baby is born and when they are pregnant. She recites many of the 'tips' people have given her (good or bad) in stitch resulting in a delicate yet comic what you could call, a tapestry.

Annie Harrison's installation of bedlinen sheets was interesting and coincidentally works with the themes of history and memory like myself. "Bed sheets speak of layers of memory, of archaeological strata containing the artefacts of people and place"



Isabel Dibden Wright



I love the colours and textures in this hanging by Isabel Dibden Wright. I would like to experiment with stitching and layering fabrics in this way!

Recent sketchbook work

I am interested in the nature of childhood and innocence and exploring this by looking at positive and evocative phrases which people are brought up on. I am using photos from my own childhood to create stitched drawings which I hope to combine with phrases and/or lines of poetry. The image in itself interests me as a form of documentation, memory and distilled emotion. I like combining words with these as I feel it builds a narrative which can be interpreted differently by different viewers depending on their own experiences of life and childhood. For me, these images excite extremely positive emotions but I don't expect all viewers to feel this way. I understand that it is very personal to my own memories.

 I hope to combine my eventual combination of images with audio tracks.

Paul Shepherd: But it moves.

“The wilderness is not a landscape you visit; it is all around you, where ever you are. We persuade ourselves that our taming of the world is profound, we lay water mains and sewers and read thousand year old books, we drive autobahns through solid rock, we huddle together in caves lit by incandescence of television screens. We do everything we can to be safe, and still the planet spins, the wind roars, the great ice caps creak and heave, the continental plates shudder and bring cities crashing to the ground, the viruses infect us and the oceans toy with us, lapping against the edges of our precarious land. We are in the midst of wilderness, even curled up with our lovers in bed.”

By Paul Shepherd from “the cultivated wilderness, or, what is a landscape?” 

This is one of my favourite quotes, you can spend hours considering all of its
profundities and the imagery is just amazing. Extremely poignant.

Swan Lanterns with Jo Foley and Fiona Smith

In September, I went to work with community freelance artists Jo Foley, Fiona Smith and Anna at Platt Fields Park. I helped to build these Swan Lanterns from Bamboo which are to be exhibited at 4 events ending at Platt Field's Centenary Firework display on the 5th of November! A local brownie group along with other groups from the Manchester area were invited to help paper the swans and a number of triangular bamboo lanterns. Hopefully the display will sail well and all of the groups involved will be out to see them in their finale on the 5th!