Embroidery November - December 2022

Welcome. This month we would like to pay tribute to Her Majesty The Queen who touched all our lives in her 70-year reign. Almost one-third of us are said to have seen or met the Queen. I saw the Queen only once, during a royal visit to Salisbury Cathedral to celebrate 800 years of the Magna Carta, the cathedral having the finest copy. We were informed beforehand that we should address Her Majesty, if she spoke to us, as ‘Ma’am’ pronounced to rhyme with ‘jam’, rather than ‘yarn’, which was a small surprise. Among the throng, I caught a glimpse of the vivid fuchsia dress, matching coat and tonal hat the Queen had chosen to mark the occasion. My colleague, as a member of a mumming group chosen to exhibit…

A year-long exhibition by Iranian rug-maker Mehdi Jalalaghdamian is on show at Firstsite in Colchester, until 3 September 2023. Art in Exile is the start of a programme leading from, and funded by, the gallery’s Art Fund Museum of the Year 2021 award. Currently living in temporary accommodation in Bournemouth, after being recently moved from Colchester, Mehdi is seeking asylum in the UK. The gallery’s director, Sally Shaw MBE, says: ‘If Mehdi’s application to settle in the UK is successful, or he is granted right to work in the interim, we will… commission a new rug, which he will create while in residence here at Firstsite.” Art in Exile features three rugs, made during Mehdi’s time as a refugee in Stockholm, Sweden. The painstaking method of creating each piece is…

Many of the exhibitors at London Design Festival in September offered quirky takes on our notions of textiles and textile art, while UKRI’s (UK Research and Innovation) Textile Circularity Centre promoted its research into a future circular textiles economy, with the aim of creating a link between recycling waste and wellbeing. Fashion and textile designer Helena Elston was offering an unusual workshop based on her practice of upcycling textile waste with mycelial growth, the underground network of fungi that you don’t normally see. Sustainable designs made from London waste products, such as discarded textiles, garments and coffee sacks, are manipulated through her unique mycelium process to produce pieces that range from complete garment decomposition to applique? on waste garments and seaming alternatives for thread., pictured above right. These designs show…

Depicting 420 million years of Scottish history and at 143-metres long (the Bayeux Tapestry is about 70-metres long), The Great Scottish Tapestry is the Godfather of modern Bayeux-inspired tapestries. It is made up of 300 miles of wool. The brainchild of renowned author Alexander McCall Smith, the tapestry’s purpose-built home in Galashiels opened to the public on August 26. It is hoped the gallery will help revitalise the surrounding area. The tapestry involved 1,000 stitchers from the community and the project is run by a charitable organisation. WWW.GREATTAPESTRYOFSCOTLAND.COM…

Winner of the Fine Art Textiles Award 2022, pictured right, Jess Blausteins’ Table Settings, 2020–2021, four weeks of dinner tracings with pencil and thread on recycled household linens, 68in x 48in, will be on show at the Knitting and Stitching Show Harrogate 17–20 November, along with work from all shortlisted finalists. WWW.THEKNITTINGANDSTITCHINGSHOW.COM The first institutional survey exhibition of artist Rosemary Mayer (1943–2014), called Ways of Attaching and covering over 40 years of her prolific and varied practice, is at Spike Island, Bristol, until 15 January 2023. Spike Island has collaborated on the publication of a collection of letters between the Mayer sisters. The two sisters, an artist and a poet, describe the contours of their lives among New York’s artistic avant-garde. Rosemary was creating sculptures, watercolours, books and ‘temporary monuments’…

Simone Elizabeth Saunders: u.n.i.t.y. is on show at The Textile Museum of Canada until 29 January. Evoking personal history, Afro diaspora and black sisterhood, Saunders creates portraits with bold and colourful textiles. Her dramatic tufted works incorporate motifs from her Jamaican heritage and engage with socio-cultural factors to reclaim power from oppressive ideologies. Saunders’ background in theatre arts informs her practice, as she integrates dramatism and story-telling within her creations. Saunders has only recently embraced textile art, but her great-grandfather in Jamaica was an affluent tailor. Inspired by Czech artist Alphonse Mucha, Four Queens, 2020, sees black women take poses similar to those in Mucha’s Precious Stones (1900) but gaze directly at viewers as embodiments of Black Power, Dreams, Magic and Love. TEXTILEMUSEUM.CA…