Aug 3rd - Joanne Frankel Workshop

 Joanne's textile art specialized in combining drawing and painting with hand and free machine embroidery. A design drawn on paper was free machined onto a base fabric.

 

This was then painted.

Fabric was appliqued onto the painted design and completed by machine embroidery.

This piece then has to be hand embellished.

Textile workshop samples by pupils today in Joanne's class.

Joanne's work as shown below is truly inspirational. She is a wonderful teacher and was willing to share so many of her ideas and expertise with us. The workshop was a fabulous day and we learnt so much from her calm and attentive teaching method. A big thank you from all of us here at GTAG (Grassington Textile Arts Group).

May 4th - Contemporary Textile Workshop with Elnaz Yazdini

 

A fabulous workshop and a great introduction to a contemporary workshop in Mixed Media and Stitch at the May meeting of the GTAG  (Grassington Textile Arts Group).

Elnaz is a practicing mixed media textile artist, specialising in mixed media textiles and embroidery design. She says "My practice crosses boundaries between textiles for fashion, jewellery and sculpture".

Elnaz arrived at our venue with boxes of inspirational items to incorporate with stitch or full kits for those members who felt a little timid when embracing these new ideas.

She also provided plenty of samples for the group to use as inspiration in their pieces.

Elnaz stressed that the main focus of her work was to challenge the process of embroidery and stitch to develop new ways in which to connect, embellish and transform materials.

Below are a few samples of our groups work after a morning with Elnaz. She certainly provided the group with new ideas and inspiration to incorporate into our next stitch projects.

Samples of this month's travelling pages:

April sunsets in Rossendale

Easter Bonnet

April Nature Notes

 

"The impact of my Churchill fellowship studying medieval tapestries on my current practice" by Dr Chrissie Freeth

We were treated to a superb talk by Chrissie Freeth at our first meeting back at the Rugby Club. Chrissie is a traditional handloom weaver and tapestry artist based in Saltaire in West Yorkshire. Chrissie explained that as an archaeologist she was interested in historical textiles and first learned to weave on a warp-weighted loom as an undergraduate. She gradually left academia to weave full time. Thanks to the Churchill Fellowship she was able to travel across Europe and to the US to study collections of medieval tapestries to better understand the techniques used by weavers at the zenith of tapestry production. 

The fellowship resulted in an archive of over 14,000 images of 170 tapestries which she uses as an invaluable resource in her present work. Chrissie's work explores the female experience and in particular those universal themes that connect us across cultures and centuries - exile, grief, fractured families, failed motherhood, rejection, and survival, defiance, rebirth. Her tapestries are inspired by real women, usually ancestors, or by folk tales. She plays with symbolism and religious iconography and whilst pre-renaissance tapestries are a foundational inspiration and academic interest, her work re-imagines them for contemporary relevance.

 Thank you Chrissie for an inspirational start to our new GTAG (Grassington Textile Arts Group) year and congratulations on having your work "Memento Mori" selected for the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition, which is being held from the 22nd Sept - 2nd Jan.

Here is a completed 3D floral textile work from our afternoon mini workshop.