Experiencing Change / Changing Experience at ONCA Gallery, Brighton

Bricoleur Cup from the Spelman Cup series (2016)

I am exhibiting in Experiencing Change / Changing Experience at ONCA Gallery, Brighton from 27th July –5th August 2016. I am exhibiting my Spelman Cups (2016) and an accompanying text. This work explores Elizabeth Spelman's definitions of non-repairers, and our complex relationship to repair.

From the press release:What changes have you seen? | What makes you change? | What is change for? | What would you change? | Why do we resist change? | What makes us accept change?

International artists from the e:collective launch their debut exhibition of new work exploring relationships with change on a social, economic, environmental and personal level. The exhibition will challenge, enact, refresh and stimulate our perceptions and thoughts on change, and will be viewed alongside current research by scientists at the Global Sustainability Institute, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge.

During the exhibition, artists in residence Mark Vennegoor and Aurora Sciabarra will each develop new work in the gallery, inviting visitors to participate in their practice.

Experiencing Change | Changing Experience investigates a world where environment and society is in a state of flux with large, and sometimes devastating changes predicted for the future. Change can seem inevitable or out of our hands, so how much influence do we have on change? Do we just react to the changes we experience or can we intervene?

 This project is devised by lead artist Valerie Furnham in collaboration with researcher Dr. Rosie Robison [GSI], and with the support of Arts Council England, ONCA Gallery and The Global Sustainability Institute.

  

ONCA Gallery | 14 St. George’s Place, Brighton BN1 4GB

PREVIEW | Tuesday 26th July 6:30pm – 9pm. Please RSVP to valerie.furnham@gmail.com

...by a thread... at Gawthorpe Hall

Blue Jumper (2012 ongoing) woollen jumper, hand dyed viscose threads.  

My Blue Jumper (2012, ongoing) is in an exhibition of "thoughtfully mended textiles", called ...by a thread... at Gawthorpe Hall until 19th June 2016.

The exhibition aims to explore ideas around mending, after a year of building renovation and repair at the hall itself. From the curator:
"While the stonework within the Hall was being mended - quite invisibly - we became interested in repair which did the opposite. We started looking for examples of mending which were visible and actually made a feature of wear and tear. We discovered that with textile items, repair can be storytelling, creative and commemorative. It can add something extra and bring new meaning and emotion to an object. It can tell us more about people, history, memories and lives."

The artefacts exhibited in ...by a thread... all display thoughtful and careful repairs, and include Karen Suzuki’s rescued teddy, Jacy Wall’s Japanase boro jacket, David Worsley’s darned jeans, Angela Maddock’s repaired Wrangler jacket and Jenni Steele’s 1930s nurse’s apron, along with Claire Wellesley-Smith’s Japanese boro bloomers and Coreen Cottam’s family quilt. Each comes with a story written by the lender, explaining why the process and act of repair is significant to them.

About Blue Jumper
I consider Blue Jumper, a heavily darned navy blue jumper, to be a performative artwork that I wear and work on. I found it in pristine condition, in a charity shop off Old Street, London, now Blue Jumper is heavily darned yet still worn. As environmentalist I am anti-waste, and I wear only second-hand wool. When moths ate Blue Jumper, I continued wearing it.

This garment can be considered disobedient, and it certainly has a disobedient wearer. Repairing is both “obedient” to my own “reason or conviction (autonomous obedience)” of being anti-waste and pro-circularity, and disobedient to those of our consumer culture, where “obedience to a person, institution or power (heteronomous obedience) is submission” (Fromm 1981, p19). My stitched intervention displays my politics: my slogan not shouted but darned. Blue Jumper is personal, political, active and rebellious.

Arguably our dominant culture is what Erich Fromm describes as having - with principles around ownership, gains and growth. To repair together (I began the darning on this jumper with tomofholland, simultaneously beginning our friendship) is to push back (that act of obedience/disobedience) against capitalist consumerism and embrace Fromm’s mode of being – “to share, to give, to sacrifice - that owes its strength to the specific conditions of human existence and the inherent need to overcome ones isolation by oneness with others” (1984, p108).

I find myself resilient against pressure to buy new: I can, I will, I am, through choice and necessity, wearing, repairing and re-wearing. In celebration of resistance and autonomy, like Plutarch’s Ship of Theseus, I will keep repairing Blue Jumper until all is repair, and beyond.

Fromm, E. (1981) On Disobedience and Other Essays. New York: The Seabury Press.
Fromm, E. (1984) To Have or To Be. London: Abacus, Sphere Books

'Sides to Middle: My Way of Working' in Mending Revealed

Repair is a material act. It starts from that which is already in existence, enters into the objects narrative part way through, a late arrival to the tale. However familiar the act of repairing may become, individual damages always have their own characters; breaks always need personal consideration before repair can begin. The repairer must make decisions, write their part of the story.

My role as repairer is long standing. From stitching patches on my clothes to gluing unfortunate objects, the act of repair and I have a deep relationship. I am fascinated by repair, and by the brokenness which requires repair, which repair requires in order to exist.

Where sides to middle refers to the practice of splitting sheets through worn middles, and stitching the good sides together, through my practice and my artefacts I seek to understand ownership materially and emotionally, moving both process and object from the sides to the middle. My focus is on materials with previous existences and their palimpsests: I look to recast things through making, remaking and repairing.

In The Craftsman, Richard Sennett suggests that 'a model is a proposal rather than a command. Its excellence can stimulate us, not to imitate but to innovate.' (2009, p101) Through the creation of repair models, I propose ways of approaching repair and repairing, sometimes functionally, sometimes not. My repaired or remade objects are considered but not excellent per say, through my work I have rendered many of them not-excellent, possibly even anti-functional. My mends are idiosyncratic - some verge on idiotic - they do not make the object typically useful again.

When I hang my plates on a wall in a gallery, I am aware of the difference to using them to eat from at home. I am aware of their potential position as aesthetic stance only, whatever my intention. These plates and their mends are actuals and potentials, stories and ideas. Stimulation is their aim: to act as provocateur or goad, questioning us questioning them.

Some of my work will be in the exhibition Mending Revealed at Bridport Arts Centre from 4th March - 16th April 2016. I will be speaking about it on 12th March, in the gallery space.

https://www.bridport-arts.com/events/mending-revealed/

I am exhibiting in RE-Reanimate, Repair, Meld & Mend

Blue Necklace, 2012

I am showing Blue Necklace in this small exhibition at the Bluecoat Display Centre, Liverpool. It features the work of artists who are concerned with the re-use and reanimation of existent (often devalued or discarded) cultural material.

Blue Necklace is made from 800 hand cut, coloured and polished beads made from reclaimed or re-animated maple wood. My AHRC funded doctoral research is focused on the practice of repairing and making, and this work demonstrates a different cycle of repair – material re-use as environmental repair - and continues redefining the assumed aesthetics of the recycled and examining the impact of personal actions in the greater scheme of sustainability.

My research aims to define repair as a bridge between creativity and practicality, as crossing boundaries and as a methodology with which to actively explore sustainability, identity and community. Exploring the multidimensional area of repair through (re)making, investigating materials, joining methods and object narratives, I am making and collecting a series of objects, techniques and experiences, investigating the potential for visible repair as part of an expanded studio practice.

Re- Reanimate, Repair, Meld & Mend is showing at Bluecoat Display Centre from 10 October – 14 November 2015.

Artists include Michael Brennand-Wood, Neil Brownsword, David Clarke, Robert Dawson, Bouke de Vries, Steve Dixon, Amy Douglas, Jenni Dutton, Matthew Harris, Bridget Harvey, Charlotte Hodes, Gitte Jungersen, Carol McNicoll, Livia Marin, Irene Nordli, Caroline Slotte, Linda Sormin, Hans Stofer & Jacy Wall. The exhibition is curated by Paul Scott.

http://www.bluecoatdisplaycentre.com/exhibition/re-reanimate-repair-meld-mend/

The Geometrics

 Exhibition opening today!  

Private view tonight, 6-9pm.

Open until 5th May, more details here: http://thegeometrics.blogspot.co.uk/

The Geometrics

My work will be featured in this exhibition next month

20/4/13 - 5/5/13

The Geometrics: Volume 1 showcases a new chapter in British textiles –

their meaning, possibility, diversity and reach. In the first of a series of 

exhibitions, Volume 1 focuses on the interface between fine art, 

film and fashion. 

Geometrics have always been central to populist textile design, from Aztec 

weave and Xhosa beadwork to Sonia Delaunay knit and Jonathan Saunders 

print. The Geometrics: Volume 1 works this rich legacy into present day 

processes, media and methods. Html patchwork, Nbedele-inspired plastics, 

geometric performance gifs, embroidered wood, lazercut laminates and 

open source design: this is contemporary British textiles, new media, 

new language, new meaning.

The artists are a group of emerging practitioners and design activists 

specializing in tactile mathematical form, pattern, structure and narrative. 

The majority of them trained at the Royal College of Art and Chelsea College 

of Art & Design and invite study in their own right. 

A dynamic and inspiring public programme of events, workshops and 

a one-day symposium accompany the exhibition. The Geometrics:

Volume 1 book is also launched outlining the artists working processes 

and focus on geometrics.

http://thegeometrics.blogspot.co.uk/

 @The_Geometrics         #thegeometricsexhibition

Upcoming residency

I am excited to say that I have been accepted on to this residency next month.

We Weave loom

We Weave loom

Open for working in to 

at Camberwell College of Arts library 

until Thursday 21st February

This loom offers the option of participation, giving an opportunity for experience, exchange and dialogue through (possibly) “affective labour”, and creating in the process a sculpture – a fabric or material artifact - (the first made on this loom), recording the participants choices, movement and involvement. 

I have made this loom as an open piece in order to create a group sculpture.  Visitors are invited to thread a needle and have a go, weave in lines, blocks or shapes, knot, bind or stitch in to the warp.  I have provided some materials but anything can be added to it.  I have left a disposable camera there for participants to record their weaves (if they would like to).  I am hoping to take this loom elsewhere after this initial project and create a series of group works from it.

a couple of other posts by me about affect

Wondersite Exhibition at the Japanese Embassy

                                             

The group show that I am part of opens at the Japanese Embassy, Piccadilly, London (Green Park station) today.  It includes responses from 10 artists to a shared trip & residency to Tokyo for the month of March this year.  My work is pictured below responds to a fireman's helmet and gloves I saw at the Folk Craft Museum in Tokyo, and also to the use of double stitches which I encountered a lot.  The uniform was actually quilted cloth, hence the marks on the helmet I have made referencing the stitching on the original.  I was very interested by the knotting and other thread/rope/textile based ideas I saw there, both in a historic context and everyday.  Also in the use of dyes, colour and pattern.  The smaller blue arm piece references a pattern used in the wood work of a window, the larger arm piece looks at the bamboo fencing I saw in a lot of places.