Tag: Textile Art

Artist Focus: Elaine Peden

One of Elaine’s artworks, ‘willowherb’ is displayed on the title wall as you enter the exhibition, ROOTS, a dialogue in textile and poetry. It is subtle yet impactful in its dyptich form, elongated shape and colour tones. It is the perfect piece to halt the viewer in their tracks, realise on closer inspection that it is a textile artwork, and then move to read about the exhibition which is writ large on either side in Irish and in English.

‘willowherb’ is inspired by Jane Clarke’s poem of the same name. It explores the harsh reality of exiting a hospital leaving a loved one behind and facing the grey, bleak hospital car park. This is a space that Elaine has inhabited many times in the past as a nurse and more recently when her father passed away.

while you were leaving
the wind picked up

and tossed lithe stems
purple-pink flower heads

by the breeze block wall
of the hospital car park ...

willowherb, Jane Clarke

Elaine uses deadstock fabrics, in this instance an old cotton and linen tablecloth which was dyed with Procion dye and Brusho powder mixed with inks, then embroidered flowers were added. It was originally one large piece but Elaine wished to reference the two sides of the story; the person exiting the hospital and the one left behind, so she was brave enough to cut it up and form it into two pieces.

Elaine says she dreams in colour and cobalt blue is her favourite. As she read Jane’s poem ‘Stepping In’ the colour came to the forefront ‘alert, electric, alive‘ to become the base colour of her piece of the same name. As a child Elaine hated the cold water but in the past few years she has returned to the water. This poem perfectly captures the experience of river swimming, awkwardly undressing and clambering down a bank to the ‘bone-cold awakening of skin‘. Elaine believes that on land we thread in shallow waters, exposing little of ourselves to the harsh world but in cold water we can plunge deeper to connect body and inner self.

This hanging was made with wet felt technique using an array of materials: merino wool, Icelandic fibre, mulberry silk, bamboo fibre, dyed wool neps, sari silk and yarn threads. Its colours are indeed electric, alert and alive.

Placed on a low pedestal beneath, is a companion piece ‘Stepping In II‘, inspired by the line ‘lemon-mossed pebbles‘ in the same poem. Elaine believes stones have a grounding effect, their weight in her hand, no hard edges, their stillness bearing witness to their surroundings.

Elaine’s third contribution to the exhibition also references the water. Jane Clarke’s poem ‘Against the Flow’ speaks of the salmon’s journey full of perils and obstacles as it moves upstream to spawn ‘…through riffles and deeps, millraces that churn in spate…’. While creating her piece of the same name, Elaine reflects on her own past life journeys when she began ‘to swim against the current‘, forge her own path, to break free.

‘One day you knew you must turn,

begin to swim against the current,

leave the estuary waters, brackish

with sediment …’

‘Against the flow‘, Jane Clarke

This wall hanging was made using the wet felting technique, Herdwick wool fibre, dyed merino wool, Tussah silk and mulberry silk. A rivulet of text from the poem runs through it.

Thank you to Elaine for sharing her thoughts, to Jane Clarke for her collaboration and to her publisher, Bloodaxe Books, for permission to use her poems. Thanks also to the OPW for the opportunity to exhibit and Kildare County Council for funding through the Arts Act Grant.

To see these works up close and personal, visit the exhibition ROOTS, a dialogue in textile and poetry, in the Coach House Gallery, Dublin Castle. Open 7 days a week, 10 am – 5 pm, closed for lunch 1.15 – 1.45 pm. Some of Jane’s books are now available in the gift shop in Chester Beatty Library next to the Coach House.

Artist Focus: Catherine Dowling

This week we look at the work of Catherine Dowling who has three pieces in our current exhibition, ROOTS, a dialogue in textile and poetry. Catherine is a versatile artist, moving with ease between felting, embroidery, collage and painting. The poems Catherine chose as inspiration for her work are all explorations of relationships with nature, with grandparents and with living in and among nature’s abundance.

Jane Clarke’s poem “Nettles” brings Catherine back to a time when she was learning to ride a bicycle and visiting every clump of nettles along the roadside of her childhood home and she questions whether dock leaves really do cure nettle stings!

We thrashed ashplants 
through chest-high clumps, 

daring them to sting bare knees. 
By evening our legs were dotted 

with swellings like hives, 
rubbed dock leaf green.

Grandpa flattened the patch in minutes 
with the swishing sweep of his scythe ...
                                                                    
Nettles, Jane Clarke

Nettles and Dock Leaves, Catherine Dowling

The second poem Catherine chose is called “Eggs” and describes the daily task of tending the hens and collecting eggs with a beloved grandmother. The poem captures the lovely moment when reaching into the nest boxes her hand wraps around a warm egg. There is something very grounded and comforting about that act. When Catherine thought about visually representing the poem, a repetitive image of eggs and hen feathers came to mind.

Having recently completed an online course with Fibre Arts Take Two which explored the medium of paper collage, it became the obvious medium for producing the representations for both poems. Using three rectangular, deep base canvasses as the substrate, Catherine worked with papers whose names are not familiar to most of us – Lokta and Himalaya paper and Wenzhou rice paper – and some more familiar such as embossed wallpaper. The wallpaper proved a very strong substrate from which to cut out leaf and egg shapes and kept its’ form through painting, gluing and drying and sealing. The Lokta paper wasn’t so tolerant of Catherine using a hairdryer to speed up the drying process! A felted and embroidered band was added to all three pieces introducing another texture to the work. The colours are subdued, faded like memory, the colour of fresh eggs perhaps?

Catherine’s third piece uses completely different mediums to respond to the poem ‘Among the Cows’. This beautiful poem tells us about a young girl getting much comfort from the gentleness of the cows who ‘let her lean into their warm bellies’ after her own mother died. Catherine grew up on a farm and cows, having always occupied the landscape of her life, drew her to recreate that childhood experience in the form of a child’s dress.

The bodice is made using wet felt technique and the skirt of tissue silk overlaid with cobweb felt, as light and ethereal as a child’s thoughts. Peeping through the gossamer layers are drawings on tissue of benign, placid cows.

The poem captures a young girl’s grief and an awareness that her feelings are mirrored in the sense of loss a calf experiences when it is weaned…

Her father knew where to find her;
she liked to stand among the cows ....

She would listen to the calves
calling for days when weaned,

until their voices, exhausted,
faded like mist from the fields.

Among the Cows, Jane Clarke

Thank you to Catherine for sharing her techniques and thoughts behind these works. Thanks also to Jane Clarke for her collaboration, her publisher, Bloodaxe Books, for allowing us to use her poetry, Kildare County Council Arts Office for grant funding and the OPW for offering us an exhibition space.

To see Catherine’s work visit Roots, a dialogue in textile and poetry at The Coach House Gallery, Dublin Castle, Monday to Sunday, 10 am – 5 pm (closed for lunch 1.15 – 1.45 pm).

Artist Focus : Fidelma Barton

Over the duration of the ROOTS exhibition in the Coach House Gallery in Dublin Castle, we will feature the work of one artist each week and the poetry that inspired it. Starting with Fidelma who has created five artworks for the exhibition.

Fidelma’s medium of choice is paint. Since joining element15 she has successfully expanded her practice to include textiles, paper, stitch and found objects. A case in point (excuse the pun) is ‘Stay’ partly crafted from a piece of old leather appliquéd onto distressed and painted fabric.

The work was inspired by Jane Clarke’s poem, The Suitcase, describing a woman’s packed suitcase stored permanently under the bed and her children’s apprehension at what that might mean…

"As children they didn't understand                                                                                                                        that despair was a neighbour                                                                                                                                              of love and if you were lucky                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      it stayed beyond the garden gate just visiting from time to time ..."

The Suitcase, Jane Clarke

The suitcase was both her anchor and her possibility of escape.

Fidelma used a piece of leather from an old jacket to craft the main suitcase, making it ‘real’. The other suitcases, all different in design to show our individuality, were painted in the same colour tones to represent the idea that somehow we all have something to ground us. The background fabric was torn, the edges singed and painted in sepia tones to represent those moments of distress when we might just reach for the suitcase. In this work Fidelma asks if we all have our own ‘suitcase’ to offer a means of escape or a reassurance to stay?

The second featured artwork comprises two individual pieces, ‘In a Moment I and In a Moment II’, in response to Jane’s poem, Kintsugi. This poignant poem captures the moment when a dear friend is injured and subsequently dies. ‘When I heard you were knocked from your bike…I let the teapot slip from my hands’. The teapot shattering as it falls to the ground symbolizes the poet’s world falling apart in that moment when she received the heartbreaking news.

Fidelma used soft, fading colours to create an almost dreamy background aiming to capture the sense of absence and stillness that surrounds us during such moments. It’s as if everything around you blurs in that fleeting instant.

“Late in the evening I found the teapot could not hold”. Fidelma was moved by the depiction of the teapot, its pieces meticulously glued back together in an attempt to restore it, occupying the poet’s hours while she awaited news. In the tradition of kintsugi, Fidelma used gold to ‘repair’ the cracks in the teapot symbolising the hope that the repaired pot would be as good, if not better than before. Yet, like the life of the poet’s friend, the teapot was ultimately beyond saving.

In creating the base for ‘In a Moment II‘, Fidelma challenged herself to replicate the background effect achieved on board in “In A Moment I,” by using a mix of paint mediums on oil cloth. The loose threads not only symbolize the pot’s leakage but also the helplessness in such moments of tragedy. Small golden paint droplets were added to the ends of the hanging threads to symbolize tears.

Some small details of the works in progress as Fidelma created them and built up the layers of paint and stitch.

Thank you to Jane Clarke and her publisher, Bloodaxe Books for allowing us to work with her poetry, and to Fidelma for sharing her thoughts and processes with us.

The exhibition is open 7 days a week from 10 am until 5 pm (with a lunch break from 1.15-1.45) at the Coach House Gallery, Dublin Castle until 19th January 2025.

ROOTS, a dialogue in textile and poetry

The countdown is on. Sixteen months of work is coming to fruition. From 23rd September 2024 we will start to hang an exhibition of artworks created in response to the poetry of Irish poet, Jane Clarke, in The Coach House, Dublin Castle. The exhibition will be open to the public from 26th September and our official launch will be in early October.

This is such an exciting time for us as a collective. We have lived with the emotions and memories evoked by Jane’s poems for many months and we have taken them to our hearts. We each chose a poem, or a number of poems to respond to, creating unique artworks using different techniques, which reflect her words and the personal memories those words brought to the surface in each artist. Confronting the personal memories that were dredged up for each artist was not always an easy process, but we feel privileged to be able to have the ability to express the personal in artworks that may speak to us all.

Thank you to the OPW for granting us an exhibition space as wonderful as The Coach House, Dublin Castle and the staff at Dublin Castle for their help and cooperation. We especially thank, Jane Clarke for trusting us to give visual expression to her quiet, powerful words.

Thanks also to Kildare County Council for grant funding under the Arts Act and to Niamh in Inniscara Bespoke Framing, Co. Kildare who has worked with us in devising a cohesive framing plan for our diverse artworks.

More images and information will follow as we put the products of our emotions and Jane Clarke’s words on the white walls of the Kane Room, Dublin Castle.

Credit: Image used in our poster: ‘Final Moments‘ Pauline Kiernan.

Textile and Poetry in Dialogue

For the past year and a half, we have been quietly working on a really interesting project. You may have seen images of some pieces of work in progress on our Instagram account.

In January 2023, we were introduced to the very distinctive voice of Irish poet, Jane Clarke, and began a dialogue between her poetry and our contemporary textile art practice.

We were drawn to the imagery of her poems which explore how people, landscape and culture shape us. During these past months we have lived with the emotions and memories that the poems evoke. Jane’s poetry is rooted in rural life, but she is not afraid to tackle contemporary issues, expose intense personal emotions of family, relationships, love and loss.

Print, drawing and stitch on paper by Sally Hewetson

Works on paper, Sally Hewetson

The journey with Jane’s poetry has led us to delve into our own life experiences, our sorrows and joys and has prompted the creation of nearly 50 pieces of artwork. As a project it has allowed us take a contemplative, slow approach to responding to the poetry. We had time to experiment, to try out different materials and techniques to find the best way to express our visual response to the written word.

Rust dying and stitch on organza by Kathrina Hughes

Rust dye, stitch on cotton organdie, Kathrina Hughes

During conversations with Jane, we discovered a lot of commonalities in our process of creating – time spent thinking and living with ideas before they form words on paper or images on textile. Textile has long been a vehicle for storytelling. Personal stories of lived experience and moments of everyday life patched and stitched together. Contemporary textiles continue the lineage but move to more abstract forms of expression.

We will show this body of work, alongside the poems that inspired it, in a major exhibition opening at the beginning of October. More details next month. We hope you can join us then to see the culmination of our journey with the wonderful poetry of Jane Clarke.

We are very grateful for the support we have received from the Office of Public Works, Kildare Arts Service @arts_in_co_kildare, Jane Clarke (www.janeclarkepoetry.ie) and Jane’s publisher, Bloodaxe Books @bloodaxebooks.

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