'What have I got to do to make it okay' curators tour

The exhibition at The Pumphouse Gallery 'What have I got to do to make it okay' ends at the end of the month.
If you arent able to visit then you might find Liz Cooper's tour of the show on the Studio International website interesting.  Liz talks in depth about all the work in the show.

http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/liz-cooper-video-interview-what-do-i-need-to-do-to-make-it-ok



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What have I got to do to make it okay?

I have two large scale quilts in the exhibition ‘What Do I Need to Do to Make it OK?’  which opens tomorrow in the Pump House Gallery, Battersea Park, London SW11 4NJ.  http://pumphousegallery.org.uk/visit-us/
 

The show is an investigation into damage and repair, disease and medicine, and the healing and restoration of landscapes, bodies, minds and objects through stitch and other media.  The other featured artists are Dorothy Caldwell, Saidhbhín Gibson, Celia Pym, and Freddie Robins. What Do I Need to Do to Make it Ok? is a touring exhibition curated by Liz Cooper, and supported by Arts Council England and the International Textile Research Centre of the University for the Creative Arts.  The show will continue at the Pumphouse Gallery until 1^st November 2015 before a tour to at least five venues across England (and possibly further afield) until the end 2017. There will be a symposium exploring the exhibition's themes on Wednesday 2 March 2016 at UCA Farnham.

I feel very honoured to be showing alongside such esteemed artists.  Liz Cooper selected ‘The Leper’s Skull’ which was shortlisted for Fine Art Quilt Masters at Festival Of Quilts earlier this year and ‘60 beats a minute’ which was the first large scale digitally stitched quilt I made and was featured in Made in the Middle back in 2012 and ‘Things we do in Bed’ at Danson House in 2014. 
There are also two small scale pieces based on the x-rays from the Andersen Archive in BARC at the University of Bradford.
http://www.karinathompsontextiles.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/error-in-bone-installed-part-1.html
 

The exhibition’s other artists have varied approaches to the theme: Dorothy Caldwell’s hand-stitching explores how humans have marked and visualised landscapes from the Arctic to Australia to create maps of land and memory; whilst Freddie Robins uses precision machine-knitting, combining hand-crafted and found objects to examine preoccupations with crime, illness and fear.  Celia Pym’s interest in process has led her to knit her way round Japan and to rescue discarded garments. Saidhbhín Gibson’s work focuses on man’s interaction with landscape, showcased in stitch-led interventions with natural objects, such as the “repaired” thrush’s nest titled Comfort and Joy. With deliberate ambiguity in their titles, her work poses the question: is it art that makes things better, or nature?
 

The image above is the Leper’s skull.  I haven’t been able to blog about this piece before as it was a competition entry and the rules are very strict about how much information you can release about a piece before the competition.  For more information about the piece see this blog post.
http://www.karinathompsontextiles.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/the-lepers-skull.html
If you are in the neighbourhood please pop along and see it. Admission is free, Wednesday - Sunday  11am - 5pm.

Festival of Quilts 2015

I am very, very excited to have a piece shortlisted for the Fine Art Quilt Masters prize at Festival of Quilts this year.  The prize is one of the biggest competitions in the quilt world in Europe.

I can’t show you the piece as that would invalidate my entry but it is from the ‘Error bred in the bone’ project up at BARC, University of Bradford.  It’s based on an x-ray of a skull from a medieval cemetery attached to a leper’s hospital in Chichester, and the archaeological dig plans of the site.

The image above is also from the ‘Error bred in the bone’ project and is a detail of an archive x-ray from a leper’s hospital in Addis Ababa from the 1980s.  This piece is in the Quilt Art 30^th anniversary exhibition ‘Small Talk’ which is in the gallery section of the Festival of Quilts.  This show of smaller pieces is the companion show to Dialogues which will open at the Quilt Museum in York in September.  You can buy the accompanying catalogue here. http://www.quiltart.eu/quiltartpublicat.html

AND finally I will also be on the Festival panel discussion ‘How does a quilt become a piece of fine art?’ along with Sue Prichard, Keeper of Textiles at the V&A, Dr Sue Marks, Helen Parrott, and my dear Danish friend Charlotte Yde on Friday 7th August, 12.15pm - 1.00pm.  A big subject for a 45 minute discussion!  You can find out more and book tickets here.
http://www.thefestivalofquilts.co.uk/Content/Panel-Discussions/8_42/

So it will be a very busy Festival of Quilts for me.  If you don’t see me on the Fine Art Quilt Masters gallery, or the Quilt Art Small Talk exhibition, or the panel discussion then you’ll find me on the Pfaff stand driving the long arm Powerquilter.  Please come along and say hello!

Dialogues with Quilt Art

The first work to come from the ‘Error bred in the bone’ project at the Biological Anthropological Research Centre at Bradford University went on public display at Textilmuseum Max Berk, Heidelberg, Germany as part of the Quilt Art exhibition ‘Dialogues’.  The piece above is based on an x-ray of a pelvis with Paget’s disease, a debilitating and degenerative condition and an extract of Wallace Stevens’ poem ‘A postcard from the volcano’.

The show looked fabulous and is accompanied by a full colour catalogue with essays about each member by critic and curator Dr Susan Marks. You can order a copy of the catalogue here http://quiltart.eu/quiltartpublicat.html

Not going to be in Heidelberg before the 2^nd of August……don’t worry the show comes to the Quilt Museum in York, UK 11^th September – 31^st August.  There are other dates for this shows tour and its smaller sister show ‘Small talk’ here http://quiltart.eu/quiltartvenues.html

The leper's hands

As part of the ‘Error bred in the bone’ project I started looking at evidence of leprosy in the BARC collection.  Now the evidence of the disease in the collection in two main forms: The bones from the medieval cemetery of St James and Mary Magdalene in Chichester and the Andersen Archive a collection of x-rays from a leper’s hospital in Addis Ababa in the 1980s.  You can see the online catalogue here
http://www.barc.brad.ac.uk/FromCemeterytoClinic/

One of the common myths about leprosy is that your fingers, toes and nose drop off.  It’s not true.  What does happen is that the bacteria are most active in in the cooler parts of the body; the extremities and the nasal passage.  What happens is your body starts to reabsorb your bone and so your fingers and toes start to shorten and the bones in the nose start to disappear.  In the early stages sometime the fingers lock into a ‘claw’.

I find the Andersen archive heart breaking.  These were images taken living memory, in fact Dr Keith Manchester says he thinks he can identify some of the patients form these x-rays from his time out at the hospital.  And 30 years ago the medication was good but wouldn’t have halted the loss of bone.  The patients’ hands in these x-rays would have continued to deteriorate after the image was taken.

These x-rays have become the starting point for some digital stitch pieces that I will talk about in a future post.