Changing Earth textile exhibition and Under the Vast Sky by Britta Marakatt-Labba
“Queenie, in her childhood, had been ‘brought up to the pillow’, sitting among the women at eight years old and learning to fling her bobbins with the best of them.” From Lark Rise to Candleford by Flora Thompson, 1939
Having enjoyed the Eastern Region Textile Forum members’ exhibition in Hertford back in March, I was keen to see their summer exhibition at Hyde Hall near Chelmsford this month and it certainly lived up to the anticipation. Hyde Hall is the Royal Horticultural Society’s Essex garden and I’ve visited on and off for years. Visiting on the 8th May I was delighted to be greeted by a massed planting of beautiful blue camassias which formed a spectacular welcome display.
The textile exhibition in the Hilltop Lodge was inspired by the research, findings, and recommendations contained in the RHS report ‘Gardening in a Changing Climate’. The ERTF members created a fascinating response with varied work using a wide range of materials and techniques, including tapestry, embroidery, batik and cyanotype printing.
I loved Frances Green’s Two Tardigrades Take Tea and Knit Worms, a playful mixed media piece inspired by soil microfauna and her bead embroidery piece Roots was fascinating.
I thought that Pat Brunsdon’s rustic work Compost demonstrated how well she had considered the brief, being made from fully compostable materials, and I appreciated her intention to hang the piece in her garden to see how it breaks down over time (and the hope that it will be re-used by the bird population as nesting material).
Magenta Kang’s gorgeous Hexagon Garden was inspired by ideas of a transforming landscape.
Towards the end of the month I went to the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham city centre to see Under the Vast Sky, the first UK exhibition by the renowned artist Britta Marakatt-Labba. Marakatt-Labba is a Swedish artist of Sámi heritage, the indigenous population of the northernmost parts of Scandinavia. Her work includes fascinating and starkly beautiful panoramas chronicling the history, culture and cosmology of the Sámi people. Perhaps her most famous piece is Garjját (The Crows), 1981, a wool embroidery on linen that records a group of activists protesting against the expansion of a hydropower plant in Northern Norway. Marakatt-Labba brilliantly tells the story by depicting a sequence of crows metamorphosing into policemen who charge at the activists.
Many of her other embroideries include references to Sámi goddesses and these can also be seen in her more recent sculptures which made an interesting counterpoint to the textile work.
Bobbin for May;
Some years back I subscribed to a Bobbin-a-Month club run by Ben Archer and I really love his beautifully carved and painted bone bobbins, many of which have intricate moving parts as in the traditional ‘mother and babe’ bobbins. One of my favourites is this spring green bobbin with carved peas in the pod, which is still awaiting spangles as I am determined to find the perfect pea-green glass beads…
