The Body Shop Quilt at the Pound, Corsham.
One of the textile groups I belong to, The Bath Textile Artists, is currently exhibiting at the Pound, Corsham (www.poundarts.org.uk/), and I have a small number of pieces in the show. I included my Day of the Dead pieces:
Day of the Dead, I, II and III at The Pound, Corsham
This is not a brilliant photograph as it was quite difficult not to get the reflection on the glass, but you get an idea. I had forgotten I made these as they sit on a shelf in my office and they are so familiar I don’t even see them anymore, but, I was thinking about quilts and death a couple of months ago and suddenly remembered them. I want to explore the use of quilts at various points in our life cycles and particularly the making of death quilts of which there are very few examples and so these will be a start,
But the post isn’t about these pieces. This was another outing for the Body Shop quilt, hung here in a very busy arts centre which is in pretty constant use, I think. When I went to see the whole show and my quilt, there was a children’s workshop on Mexican wrestling masks going on. I quite liked the fact that potentially the quilt would form part of the children’s event. I had hoped to get some pictures of the whole piece, but this wasn’t a white cube gallery and so the emphasis wasn’t on the thing: the emphasis here was on context. This is a space where there is art on the walls but it is also caught up in a whole swirl of people creating for themselves, and I really liked that. I am convinced that thwarted, stunted, constricted, stamped on creativity is a root cause of quite a lot of disaffection in advanced societies like Britain. It finds outlet in ‘supplied’ creativity, commercialised and commodified vehicles such as computer games, and various packages which are designed to enhance creativity but actually breed dependency – blogging might be an example of this. The graphics packages on the Mac that this is written on are lovely and encourage experimentation, but they are all on Mr Jobs’ programmers’ terms. So, the upshot is, no white wall and artfully arranged spot light, but a piece of making in the midst of a lot of other making in a virtuous circle, making and connecting, which is great.
Having said all that, I did get some nice photos, for example, this close up of the quilt panel which is the header for this blog:
The Pre-Raphaelites - my no longer guilty pleasure
And this general view which gives an idea of the texture on the piece:
Snapshot of the Body Shop quilt
And finally, a photo which gives an indication of the scale of the piece (although not its weight – which is considerable):
It is a whopper.
