Remembering Cloth and Memory

My blogging has been rather patchy this year,  mainly with so much going on in work and play ( which is a good thing!) that there's been little time to reflect. Looking back through old posts as I do towards the end of the year, I realise  that  on several occasions I never got round to  reporting in full  as I'd promised on what I'd been up to.  For example in a post from July, I never did elaborate on seeing Bellowhead at 'Kew the Music';my starring role  (wearing orchid earrings!) in a film narrated by David Attenborough; on my trips to various orchid sites and  to Hampton Court Flower Show or to re-write my post on RA Summer Exhibition  that I accidently deleted while attempting to blog with my tablet!

Too  late now  but  before I forgot completely I did want to mention my visit to Cloth and Memory 2 at Salt Mills Saltaire. It's nearly 2 months ago when I  had a day trip combining handing over some precious Lady's Slipper Orchid seedlings with  seeing this exhibition. It had some of the same exhibiting artists as ' Bite Size' a couple of years ago but obviously on a completely different scale!!! The space, the  168m long spinning room, was amazing in itself and the way that the work  was derived from  its different qualities and memories was thought-provoking.

My  favourite piece was by Masae Bamba ( who also  made 'Black  Water' for 'Bite Size'): a large scale 'sea' of indigo cloth  printed with her daughters' first attempts at writing.

The peeling paint layers left on the walls were wonderful and I liked how Rachel Gray had referenced these, with several narrow brick-like works  of layered, patched, embroidered, printed images from the archives local to Saltaire  

 

Yoriko Yoneyama's  instillation of a web of dried rice threaded on fine thread was intriguing, reminding me of the rain outside ( and occasionally inside, there were strategically placed buckets...) blurring the images glimpsed through the camera obscura ( by Hannah Leighton-Boyce ) placed in the ventilation cavities.

You were encouraged to add your own memories of cloth - mine was photographed but didn't make it to the website. 

 

My CQ Journal quilts this year have the theme of indigo, many of them assembled from scraps. I was thinking of my experiences  at Saltaire when I was putting this one together: the  crumpled indigo  dyed strips of  'jemima' laid over dyed cotton wadding, slashed and peeled back to reveal underlying layers;  the fine  machine stitching using  white polyneon thread(slightly shiny); the effect of clouds and rain.