How Calm The Wild Water

Fiona Hutchison, who exhibited in 'Vive la Tapisserie' at the Tour this Summer, currently has a one woman show, "How Calm The Wild Water", at An Tobar, The Tobermory Arts Centre on the Isle of Mull. 4th November - 31st December. You can see some pictures here. Inspired by the sea, this exhibition explores the sculptural qualities of tapestry, paper and stitch. This new body of work was developed with a personal development grant from Creative Scotland

I parcelled up 3 tapestries, including this one, to send to an exhibition in England last week. Imagine my surprise when one of them was delivered to my house having gone to Paris and apparently immediately turned round and headed back down to the South of France. Hmm - not best pleased!

So - if anyone would like this small, mounted tapestry (7.5 x 8cm) and is willing to give La Poste another go (they're usually perfectly reliable - really!), let me know. The price is £90 including tracked postage.

meabh@cantlop.com is the address

kate derum award

I have a tapestry in the Kate Derum award exhibition at the Australian Tapestry Workshop in Melbourne. The exhibition runs until 18th November. You can see the winning tapestry by Joy Smith here.

Home

The 'Vive la Tapisserie' tapestries were delivered safely home on Friday to a collective sigh of relief at this end!

The exhibition was well received (771 visitors!) and looked very beautiful in the tower. It always amazes me that a building with such a strong identity, made of such heavy (visually as well as physically) materials can take and enhance such diverse works of art.

I've put some more photos of the exhibition on the Tower's flickr site. Just click on the badge on the right hand side.

two more...

Joanne Soroka



Fiona Hutchison

vive la tapisserie! 16 july - 18 august

Some more photos from Vive la Tapisserie! at the Tour de Montsalès. It's not easy to photograph with all that perspex but just to give you an idea. Anyone interested in purchasing work please contact me for prices and more detailed pictures. The works range from 260 - 520€


Fiona Hutchison


Jo McDonald



Anna Ray on left and Sara Brennan on the right



Linda Green



Elizabeth Radcliffe



William Jefferies

walk/overlap

Walk/overlap - one of my pieces in the S.T.A.R.* show Vive la Tapisserie! at the Tour de Montsalès.

vive la tapisserie!

Vive la Tapisserie! opened on Saturday evening.

It was a great night, there was a good and very appreciative turnout and after the gallery shut lots of us had supper in the village hall followed by a concert on the green in front of the Tour. Delclaux and Charpentier - accordeon and cornemuse (pipes). I've been trying to post a video of them but without success so far.

There'll be more pictures of the exhibition to follow...

seed

Busy, busy finishing a tapestry for the S.T.A.R.* show which opens next Saturday and painting the panels that we'll be screwing the tapestries to ( the walls of the tour being too uneven and what's more, dark). Need to get out and put up posters and distribute flyers, collect frames and order mounts, weed and water the veg garden and oh yes feed people!

look!

I grew (most) of this. See I told you I wasn't wasting my time!

Rejection should get easier as we get older right? Or maybe you don't get used to it as a tapestry weaver as there are so few decent opportunities to exhibit.

I was very disappointed to be turned down for Art Tapestry 3 last week. I'd been working on my submission all Winter and it was a real blow. The platitudes in the rejection letter were particularly platitudinous (nothing to do with the quality of the work apparently!) and I felt all of a sudden so totally isolated in what is already a rather isolating craft.


Right now the vegetable garden seems like a worthwhile place to spend my time and energy but I guess I'll make it back into the henshed before long. As my ever practical and pragmatic friend Katy always says 'No one died...'! Hurt pride maybe but nothing worse than that.

out the kitchen window

Totally tapestry unrelated but this is what I saw from my kitchen window this evening. I haven't altered this photo at all!

the uninvited guest!

at the private view at the tour on Saturday evening!

garden/jardin

I've just written this statement for the upcoming show at the tour.

"Living in Salabert I have an acute sense of the seasons, the weather, nature and the passage of time. We are surrounded by tracks and lanes where we can walk and observe the year as it unfolds. From my kitchen window I can see our weather coming to us from the Lot. I feel connected.

My circles, rings, spots and stripes come from this sense of connection. Shapes repeated over and over, always subtley different which mark, physically and symbolically the passage of time.

The technique of tapestry suits these ideas, enduring as it has done, almost unchanged, since the time of the Egyptians. Methodical, slow, rhythmic."



Vivre à Salabert donne un sens aigu des saisons, du temps qu’il fait, de la nature, du passage du temps. Nous sommes comblés par des chemins et des petites routes tranquilles où on peut se promener et observer le déroulement de l’année. De la fenêtre de la cuisine je peux voir la pluie et le soleil venir depuis le Lot. Je me sens connectée.

Mes cercles, anneaux, pois et bandes de couleur sont issus de ces connexions. Des formes souvent répétées mais chaque fois subtilement différentes, qui marquent physiquement et symboliquement le passage du temps.

La technique de la tapisserie convient bien à ces idées et le fait depuis le temps des Egyptians, presqu’inchangée. Méthodique, lente, rythmique.

seeds

I'm collaging again - I want to make a couple of new pieces for the opening show at the tour de Montsalès at the end of this month. The above is a little sample to see how small I can go with my circles - those are under a centimetre. Expect fresh Spring greens!

past present future

It's finished! At 20 cm high and 1.8m wide it's quite hard to photograph. We set it up on a table in Warb's studio and I went upstairs and photographed it leaning over the mezzanine. You can see a photo of the finished piece here.

8 out of 9

The end is in sight - I'm on the last tapestry in my series of 9. I've got to admit it's beginning to feel like a slog (well today it did anyhow...) and I'll be so glad to finish. There is one I may have to redo as like a dope I used two colours in the warp and of course it shows. Can you see which one? Yep I thought so...

annie turner

Margaret Cooter mentions Annie Turner on her blog today. I have a policy of buying a piece of art or craft whenever I sell well at an exhibition. At Chelsea Crafts Fair in 2006 (I think) I was in the same aisle as Annie. I had one particularly expensive tapestry and promised myself that if it went I would have one of Annie's ladders. It's one of the things I'd rescue if the house was on fire. Spare, elegant, poetic.


There is an online exhibition of Archie Brennan's work here. It'll be there for a few months.

round

I've started a new blog purely for fun! It's here.

S.T.A.R.*

Susan Mowatt


So here's the news!

I'm delighted to announce that S.T.A.R.* (Scottish Tapestry Artists Regrouped) will be exhibiting at Galerie la Tour Montsalès this summer - 16 July - 18 August. The exhibition will be open every day from 3 - 7pm.

Fiona Hutchison

The list of exhibitors is ... Sara Brennan, Amanda Gizzi, Linda Green, Fiona Hutchison, William Jeffries, Jo McDonald, Susan Mowatt, Paul R. Penrice, Elizabeth Radcliffe, Anna Ray, Joanne Soroka, Lesley Stothers and me.

Linda Green


There will be a great range of tapestry on show from the narrative works of Amanda Gizzi to Fiona Hutchison's textural, three dimensional evocations of the sea, Linda Green's complex textile drawings and lots more.
52 tapestries in fact - 4 from each artist.

Jo McDonald

Please tell your friends, mention this exhibition on your blogs, facebook, twitter (speaking as a facebook/twitterphobe!) anywhere! It's going to a great show and is a very exciting development for us.


Amanda Gizzi

I've finally run out of Drima extra strong thread - this is the last warp cobbled together from several spools. I am on nº 5 of my series of 9 tapestries in the as yet untitled series. Will show a photo of them soon.

I'll have some very exciting tapestry related news to announce shortly - watch this space!

christiane wilhelm

Father Christmas called bringing with him this beautiful pot by Christiane Wilhelm. It came from an amazing gallery we've discovered right on the edge of the Aveyron and the Cantal -La galerie du Don du Fel . It's a stunning contemporary building in a spectacular location and it's truly in the middle of nowhere. Despite this they have 45,000 visitors per year. That's how good it is!