Anna Rooney

 

"My work explores humanity’s relationship to nature and the ways in which textiles can promote reflection and appreciation for our environment. Urban living makes it increasingly difficult to access green spaces and our busy, fast-paced lives leave little time to slow down and support our wellbeing. I aim to engage the sense and reinvigorate a sense of childlike wonder and joy for the ordinary details present in the natural world.

I have taken conkers as my primary source of inspiration due to their common presence in urban areas and almost universal link to childhood. Photography, sketchbook work and sampling have led to a mix-media approach that involves embedding wood and ceramics into my knitted work and combining hand and machine processes. My work features two seasonal moods - one influenced by the activity and abundance of summer and autumn and the other inspired by winter and its gradual transition into spring." Anna Rooney 

My final collection includes an immersive installation space, with varied scale and consideration of colour, materials and form to make the two subcollections distinct but harmonious and complementary. For my dark collection I highlight the beauty present in quiet deterioration using flowing, branching patterns while my bright collection uses bold shapes and playful motifs. My smaller pieces invite direct interaction while the larger works inspire contemplation, altogether supporting reflection on the interplay between art, the viewer and their environment.Anna Rooney 

Ella Pengelly

"I have created works inspired by craft, which recognise the complicated relationship between art, kitsch and decorative artifacts, my work seeks to confront these boundaries. For my personal project I have created two characters Dave and Terry who feature in quite a lot of my work. Their views and personalities are aggressive and often offensive, they directly confront the absurdity of misogynist views, I increasingly see and experience as a young woman. I am interested in both the creative opportunities textiles offers, but also how textiles and craft are tangible expressions of female labour. This connection I have with the medium has empowered me and generations of women in my family, who have understood the value of craft and its rich history. I have focused particularly on quilting motifs, to create these tactile yet familiar domestic objects, combining both the delicacy of the intricate work with surprisingly confrontational statements. The work stitches these conflicting aggressive worlds of Terry and Dave’s, with the decorative environment of doilies and quilts to confront and maybe redefine what it means to be feminine...." Ella Pengelly 

Katie Harris-MacLeod

‘Machlag’"Machlag means womb in Scottish Gaelic. A word of intrigue within my practice. Life, as represented by nature, is a constant, self-repeating cycle. Through birth [maiden], life [mother] and death [crone] a woman comes to understand her place within the world. From personal aspects of my own life I am able to interpret this cycle into three different but concurrent stages - Loss, acceptance and rebirth. My work is based on this cycle. As a woman I feel through loss, my connection to nature is omnipresent. I am able to learn and accept its process, through personal exposure to the natural world. This body of work conveys collations of family narratives, repetition and a poetic dialogue between multiple generations.
I have chosen, predominantly, to use [sheep] wool as it is bio-regional to Scotland, ecologically sustainable, generally underused and in absolute abundance, coming from my families farm on the West Coast of Scotland. Wool represents protection, warmth, versatility and life. It is a beautiful natural fibre, which can be used to create a vast array of commodities. It is symbolic of meaning and true to its origins of nomadic culture. Using wool to create a material such as felt dismisses the traditional role of the artist as painter or sculptor. Felt being traditionally a ‘female’ material allows one to recognise a medium which suitably reflects my situation and its relation to the body; it is vulnerable and fragile. It has an earthy heaviness and an ethereal lightness of which allows for poetic and playful concepts behind the use of the material. With its anatomical associations, it is skin like; in the way, it takes form, with gravity, stress, balance and kinaesthetic sense.
The concept behind creating large spherical felt sculptures is that these forms are translated into something that is also female; the womb. Felt is compared to that of a womb because of its ability to absorb, to insulate, to protect and to mute. It is a symbol of life and it is literally a living piece of nature. These, then womb like sculptures are translated back to a woman’s innate connection with the earth and using a material which ‘she’ continues to provide. These sculptures symbolise a progressive tide of memories and emotions, built up over the space of life, maiden/mother/crone; a space in which one can be reborn. The outside world is muffled by the thick dark walls of the womb, reminiscent of being underwater. Silence. Embodying a narrative journey of loss, abandonment and the continuous search for a space that is sacred, safe, the mother/the father, her, woman, she, our innate [human] desire and need for protection. This narrative is then recorded through, a poetic dialogue between the artist, landscape, performance and practice of the wild, [soft] sculpture, photography, sonic art and a collation of artists books and limited editions." Katie Harris-MacLeod

For me Katies work recalled Iranian shepherds from the 1950's who wore amazing felted fleece capes (see below).

As well as the work of the incredible Magdalena Abakanowicz, who I have just found out sadly died on the 20th of April this year (examples of her work below).

Rachael Flynn

Rachael Flynn has just graduated in textile design from Dundee's Duncan of Jordanstone Art College. Textile design at Dundee is of a fantastic quality and founded on thorough visual research exploring the students chosen subject comprehensively through use of a great variety of media and techniques.

"Focusing on local bird life, I decided to use a reserved colour palate, working largely in monochrome and adding hints of subtle colour to highlight and celebrate the beauty of our British bird life. My visual research has been hugely focused around the idea of fragility; both mirroring the fragility of nature itself and that of the delicate structure of feathers. This inspired my use of silk and silk organza fabrics as these are light and soft. Additionally, I found that the organza added an element of translucence to my work that mirrored the sheer aesthetic of feathers. I also wanted my work to contrast in design; paralleling a literal drawing style which portrays a celebration of the beauty of the British bird life, with a mixed media and illustrative approach that characterises the life and energy of these birds in movement." Rachael Flynn

Rachael focused her attention on birds, her sketchbooks were a rich and delightful exploration of this subject. In her finished designs Rachael chose to use a limited monochrome palette and built up the textile design using silk organza and stitch in technique almost like Japanese sashiko or boro. The finished fabrics mascaraed a simplicity that is beguilingly complex.