out and about

The English countryside

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We had a beautiful day yesterday involving a quick trip to Ledbury, and specifically Tinsmiths to sort out post-show details. Our visit to this lovely market town coincided with the poetry festival so we also picked up some verse, locally-made pork pies, beer and ice-cream!

It was so hot in the afternoon sun but we did manage to enjoy the scenery around the Malvern Hills to-ing and fro-ing between trees for shade. It’s a stunning landscape, and one that feels so English. I first encountered the area when I cycled Lands End to John O’ Groats back in 1994 and it left its impression on me even then.

The views from the ridge make you feel as if you are a giant overseeing a toy model landscape but it is with this viewpoint I can capture my key interest in the landscape. If I was to draw the view I would have started with lines that recorded the field boundaries defined hundreds of years ago, the footpaths etched in to the land by endless walkers and roads enabling others to pass through. The lines become shapes and a record of that moment of my experience, but what is also captured is hundreds of experiences, of us, living in this English landscape.

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In terms of colours, I was struck by the stark contrast of the dry grass tones compared to the striking pink of the foxgloves and the very green bracken.

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I’m also a collector of photos of grasses and such-like against blue skies, and so I happily added further imagesummer1s to that collection.

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All in all, a very lovely English day.

scale and context

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During a beautiful adventure in the Lickey Hills, south of Birmingham at the weekend I took these photos that showed how similar the environment close to the ground was to the canopy of the much taller pine trees. It highlighted to me the experience of scale and how important the context is. I tend to record this sort of detail in my garden sketches too and so it struck a chord.

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Hanbury Hall delights

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My creative practice has been inspired by National Trust gardens for the last few years and as a result I’ve had a number of people suggest I visit Hanbury Hall – finally I got round to it at the weekend. Despite the poor weather it was a delight to discover all the pockets of gardens, each carefully considered, and demonstrating the wide variety of formal and informal planting the National Trust excels at.

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Armed with my sketchbook and camera I gathered plenty of inspiration for new prints and will definitely be back later in the season.

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Its also a fantastic building inside and out. I dashed around the inside and a particular wallpaper caught my attention.

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All in all, I left feeling excited about making new work again having spent so long preparing for my solo show at Tinsmiths, opening later this month… now where did I put that lino?

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working with nature and nature working with us

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One of the things that has inspired and influenced my creative practice is how we work with the land; to farm, build roads, wear the paths where we shouldn’t walk as well as create boundaries. These are signs of man asserting influence over nature, and the natural landscape. Of course the way things were thousands of years ago will never return but modern-day farm machinery and larger field sizes are two things that have shaped our contemporary countryside.

I have never quite understood topiary but am intrigued when I see orchards with heavily structured boughs, turning a natural system in to a geometric diagram. We ask nature to do what it does not naturally want to do. We expect plants to grow in the wrong soils, because we like the look of them despite our climate, and we can be unforgiving if a ‘weed’ dares to grow where we don’t want it to.

With this in mind I do like to see subversive and anarchic challenges from nature, and nature trying to make its mark where it shouldn’t. Like graffiti on the wrong walls; art in a gallery, vandalism on the streets, plants do sometimes have their own agenda. I found this beautiful plant surviving, flourishing even, in the mortar of a very old wall in Ledbury. It made me laugh. It wasn’t the usual ivy or buddleia, but a beautiful primula, proud as punch of its achievements. Okay, so the leaves are rather small relative to the flower heads but I couldnt help feeling rather pleased for it too.

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holding on to the details…

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This photo was taken at Birmingham’s old science museum in its last days before demolition as I was carrying out research for subsequent commissions inspired by the site. It goes some way to sum up how things are in the studio at the moment with many lists and scraps of precious information as I am very busy with making new prints & promoting my upcoming show at Tinsmiths, Ledbury next month as well as coordinating suppliers and working on exciting new design work. All this in the break between Spring and Summer terms of my lecturing job…

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geometrics out and about: PLAIDS

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There are particular visual rhythms I seem to collect as photographs when out and about and so I thought it worth while putting them together as collections of patterns. I’ll leave you guessing what might also feature over the coming months but here’s the first: plaids.

Some are more obvious than others, and while you are looking, keep an eye out for the friendly robin. There’s a list of locations below for those who might be interested.

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1a Botanical Gardens, Birmingham
1b Plot 8, our allotment, Birmingham
1c University of Warwick car park

2a Aeneas Wilder, Mead Gallery, University of Warwick
2b Heeley Rd. Birmingham
2c Olympia, London

3a Newtonmore, Scotland
3b Hastings
3c Dudley Zoo

4a Hockey arena, London 2012
4b Dudley Zoo
4c Llanthony Priory, Wales

Looking up, looking down – X marks the YSP

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We had a fantastic time at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park en route north to friends this weekend catching the penultimate day of Mark Hearld’s show there. Its such a great venue and there’s always something to discover. We managed to walk some of the grounds and the weather was stunning for the time of year. One problem was the saturated ground, particularly on the slopes which had become rather slippery as a result of snow and rain over the last few weeks. (Three out of the four of us fell to the muddy ground – okay for toddlers, rather less stylish for fully-grown adults!)

While exploring the sculptures I noticed the cross being drawn in the sky, then looked down to the ground by my feet to notice the second made in the grass. With X, V & O letters featuring heavily in my current design collection it shouted out to me. X marked a really beautiful spot up there in Yorkshire.

http://www.ysp.co.uk

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lines in the snow

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I took these photographs on my way home from Birmingham yesterday and like the way they show the different interpretations of lines and stripes in the snow I recorded. My last blog post was about colour, and so I like the fact that it is almost absent this time around. I’m sure there can be some design inspiration from these.

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tribal textiles in the Midlands

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Happy New year to you!

Seeing as I work in the professional world of textiles I’m not surprised that I spend more time than most considering our relationship with textiles. To simplify things – I question what relationship we have with fabric, and the inspiration behind our choices of garments and the materials, colours and patterns that we fill our wardrobes with – when we’ve picked the clothes up from the floor!

To celebrate the new year we went to Alvechurch to see the Alvechurch Morris dancers who put on a show each New Year in the pub car park of the Crown Inn at Withybed. As well as their dances they also perform their entertaining politically cheeky response to the past year’s news in the shape of a traditional George and the Dragon style Mummer’s play. They were also joined by several other dance groups from the region, all proudly dressed in variations of what you would expect Morris dancers to be wearing. There were plenty of pairs of beige jumbo corduroy trousers, and of course the bells round the lower leg, but the use of the strips of fabrics on the backs of the jackets and the feathers in hats really made it a spectacle of eccentric British-ness some would be surprised to see still in existence.

Having lectured on the subject of textiles for a number of years and having tried to make the education experience not British-centric the experience of seeing the Morris dancers in Alvechurch are a reminder of our own tribal dress; just as interesting, ceremonial, entertaining and socially telling as some tribal dress from far flung corners of the world a long way from here.

Some outfits appear rather more planned than others and its tricky to see if some are trying to look ‘thrown together’ but are to the contrary. Some groups (is there a collective noun for Morris dancers?) stick to set colours and one group of women were a sort of goth vamp group at Halloween with a dash of silver – I mean that in the nicest way! Personally I prefer the more traditional looking ones with a collection of faded what looks like Laura Ashley prints alongside stripes and spots. They look more like a mood board than a dance outfit.

Of course the sound and movement is lacking in the photographs but I hope they go someway to celebrate the dress code found in one small pub car park in the Midlands today and every New Years Day.

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http://www.alvechurch-morris.org.uk/index.htm

http://www.thecrownalvechurch.co.uk/index.html

drawing anywhere and everywhere

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The last few weeks have been rather busy so I close the year with a brief blog entry which will lead on to a new post in the new year about how we draw what we see… I’m still working it out in my mind but watch this space!

In the meantime I will share with you a drawing made by my daughter this summer, then four years old, of a lady. She made this while on the beach at Cromer, Norfolk. I love the way she started to build up a patterned dress using pebbles and placing sea weed for hair. I hope she never loses her love of drawing – she is a great source of inspiration to my design work and also in my teaching of design.

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