Birds on a Wire: the first of the embroidered panels by members of Aspects of Stitch. I wrote about this joint project last month.
Last Thursday was my monthly sewing club "Aspects of Stitch", an opportunity to visit Market Harboough, walk along the river and enjoy a meal, before joining the talk or workshop at the club.
Source Nigel Cheney with his exhibition at Design Nation.
This month was a talk by Nigel Cheney, who had grown up in Market Harborough, left to study embroidery in Manchester and then gone on lecture in textiles and fashion at NCAD in Dublin, Ireland's leading Art School. You can read more about Nigel's work in two interviews, here and here at Textile Artist.
Nigel has come back to Market Harborough (he's says he's retired, his mum, also in the audience for the talk, says he's unemployed) and continues to work on new ideas and experiments. His work is intricate, highly detailed, makes great use of computer aided design to create complex surfaces for embroidery and is of superb quality. His website has many beautiful and desirable objects.
One of Nigel's themes was about the influences of his family. These include his mum's rural upbringing - on her birth certificate, her father's occupation is given as Shepherd of Bumblebee Cottages; his father's and other family members' experiences in the armed services and the pervavise influence of Symington's Corset factory, where his dad was a manager and his mum an outworker.
Source Nigel's mum and dad on their wedding day.
Source And Nigel's dad now, in the meeting room set up for our talk.
Source Nigel's mum, the shepherd's daughter, a new work that will form part of the Shepherd's Daughter exhibition in Lisburn, Ireland in June 2019.
I know the fascination we have with memories and creating quilts for family and recovery, and how we all remember and love our mum's (and our own) button boxes.
One of Nigel's fascinations was with the many tape measures about the house as he was growing up. I can remember playing with these as well, learning to neatly wind them up, and then pushing the tape out of the middle, or taking the outer end and letting the tape cascade ... before winding it up again.
Source Nigel's 45 metre tape measure exhibit at CultureCRAFT.
I found some of Nigel's work iconic, in particular, the Naseby 11, a memorial of the eleven young men from Naseby village just over the county border in Northamptonshire who died in the 1914-1918 War. Concerned with the memories and loss and bereavement of the families left behind, the eleven body bags, made of reconstructed uniforms, military regalia and kitbags, are ordered by date of death, as their loss would have been experienced.
Source Detail of the Naseby Eleven exhibition.
Nothing caught and moved me more, though, than the great coat representing Richard III, complex, infamous, last Plantagenant King of England, part of the Lazarus collection. As Nigel was speaking about the complexities and history of this man, whose mutilated body was found under a car park in Leicester several years ago, I felt my mind sparking and calling ...
and remembering Cezanne's Bathers with paint scarcely covering the canvas in some places, Iain Glen playing the doomed alcoholic Jack Taylor in his liberated Garda great coat, the photograph in the Tate of a homeless black man with a spliff hidden in his hand in East London in the 60s, the fibreglass sculpture of a disintegrating head "Not quite right" that brought me to a salty waterfall of tears when I saw it soon after my partner had a stroke.
The patching and overlays, the hand-stitched blanket stitch trimming the edge, the softness of the base fabric, the stiffness and puckering of worked areas, the military brass buttons and formal regalia. No time to understand it all, greedily stroking it, trying to find its meaning, what are you saying, what are you saying, and left only with some fuzzy out of focus pictures and an inane comment to Nigel muddling up two different Civil Wars.
Nigel Cheney: Richard III from the Lazarus Collection, 2016 Detail
Nigel Cheney: Richard III from the Lazarus Collection, 2016 Detail
#maybeaminnow
Last week, I wrote about the initiative started by @steevc to grow the numbers of minnows on Steem - the number of accounts with more that 500SP. The following #needleworkmonday members have received delegations of 100SP, some sbi shares and a @dustsweeper credit to help them on their way:
- @mrscwin - I love @mrscwin's posts, it's always a pleasure when she comes up in my feed and
- @fiberfrau - posts full of colour and interesting techniques - a challenge to me to try new things and ideas.
Best wishes to both members with growing their accounts.