At last the heads are taking shape. Sarah's granddad has made us some new felting tools which hold more needles and speed up the process.

I am now on week 4 of the Sculpture Commission for the Courthouse. The dry felted shapes are starting to take on the forms needed. It has of course taken way longer then expected and without the help of everyone involved would have been impossible.

The fibre has after many false starts been ordered from Spain.

The photos show the process and the postman arriving with much needed new handles for the needles.

Samhlaiocht Filament Exhibition

Uncommon Threads - New Exhibition at Samhlaiocht

There's a new exhibition opening in Kerry's favourite little gallery on Friday, February 5th when Filament, a group of textile artists, come to Samhlaiocht.
The exhibition, Uncommon Threads, opens on Friday, February 5th and runs for three weeks, featuring work in both 2D and 3D.
"Samhlaiocht is thrilled that Filament is exhibiting in the Gallery," said Trish Thompson, Gallery Coordinator.
"Filament is a group of artists and it's great to be working with such a dynamic bunch. The exhibition will feature work by eight artists who are all members of the group and will offer an exciting mix and variety of modern and traditional textile techniques which will delight all who see it.
"Textiles can be, by their very nature, fragile and Caroline Schofield, one of the artists whose work appears, uses textiles to examine both the fragility of the human body and mind and our society, which encourages people to obsess about possessions rather than simply being comfortable with themselves.
Jean McKenna also loves working with fabric and thread, exploring the possibilities they offer in creating texture and colour, she dyes fabric and threads to create a rich palette from which to work, while pushing her skills in an experimental way to best express the love she has of textured surfaces. Her recent work is inspired by her garden in winter.In fact, quite a number of the artists are inspired by nature.
Hilary Bell, for example, draws on the landscape for inspiration. She is particularly moved by coastal rock and stone formations and feels the ancient past is hidden in the rocky landscape. She uses a variety of fibres and felting techniques to explore various surfaces and textures.
Sheila Jordan is similarly inspired and is interested in the delicate balance in nature, especially in the colours and patterns found in the everyday landscape. Working primarily in felt, she uses different varieties of wool, silk, bamboo, soya bean and cotton fabrics and sometimes even adds objects she has found. "Felting offers me an opportunity to slow down and work in a very tactile way," she says. "My current work is inspired by the coast where the colours of the sea and the quality of the light are magical with turquoise waters, beautiful stormy grey skies and foaming white water that washes up all sorts of treasures.
"While nature is the inspiration for some of the artists, others are inspired by personal experience. Sarah Dawson's work is informed by a growing awareness of the huge influence which childhood experiences have. Her work is influenced by the transforming experiences of yoga, non-violent communication and mindfulness. Combining photography, textiles, natural materials, threads, wire and clays along with the written word, her work reflects these themes and her interest in texture and form.
Tara Ni Nuallain's mixed media textiles work is also a visual expression of personal experience. She is particularly interested in the marks we make on our environment, both those made deliberately and unconsciously, with her work using mixed media textiles. She also focuses on drawing, paper and fabric collage, overlaid with hand and machine stitch.
Other artists take a more traditional approach. Mary Heffernan, a recently retired school teacher, only discovered embroidery a few years ago, which opened the door into the delightful world of textile art. Colour, texture and stitch are her passions and she feels that simply messing around with fabric and yarn can often be the starting point of an idea. Words are another source of inspirations and she combines traditional hand stitch with more contemporary design and machine embroidery.
This love of traditional machine and hand embroidery techniques is shared by Lucinda Jacob, who invariably returns to textile pieces where the stitching and manipulation has been suggested by the material itself, such as old leather evening gloves, or, on the other hand, by simple graphic motifs. She combines the simplest hand and machine stitching with a layering of fabrics and simple figurative images such as birds and animals.So whether drawing inspiration from the tactile nature of the fabrics, from nature, from personal experience or from more traditional work all the artists have one abiding theme - their love of textile and this love shines through in their work.
The exhibition will be opened on Friday, February 5th, by Una Ni She, a textile artist from Dingle and will be a treat for all lovers of art and textiles.The exhibition runs until February 26th, in the Samhlaiocht Gallery, which is located in the Old Presbytery on Lower Castle Street in the heart of Tralee. The Gallery is open from 10 am to 5 pm, Monday to Friday, is free to visit and all are welcome.

Filament Course

Mark Making for Textiles.
Course run by Filament

In the:The Discovery Park
Castlecomer,
Co Kilkenny,

On; Saturday 13th March 2010
Time: 10am to 5pm
Cost: €65.00

In this workshop, ‘Mark Making for Textiles’ we will use the surroundings of the discovery park as a source for mark making and explore how these marks might be further developed into textiles.

Filament is a group of Textile Artists based in Ireland. Innovative
in approach and practice, the group aims to provide mutual support and
to promote fibre arts through exhibitions and workshops.

Today I installed my piece titled 'Ebb & Flow' (pictured ) in the National Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin for Sculpture in Context 09. The exhibition opens on the 3rd September and is worth visiting just for its beautiful surroundings. For more information - http://www.sculptureincontext.com/

Images taken from the road outside Fennellys in Callan where Endangered held their Kilkenny Arts Week Exhibition. The building still has its original pub features, a fantastic setting to have an exhibition.

Article from the Irish Times 14th August 2009.
Image-Unravelled Textile Drawing by Caroline Schofield-taken by Colm Hogan

THE ARTS: The artists showing at this year’s Kilkenny Arts Festival faced a challenge – to make their work more accessible without sacrificing their cutting edge messages. But most of the works on show managed to appeal on many different levels, writes GEMMA TIPTON A SIGNIFICANT advantage to showing work in the visual art programme at an arts festival, is also the cause of one the strongest challenges to artists and curators. At Kilkenny Arts Festival, the regular gallery-going audience is expanded with visitors who have come for the classical music, the theatre, or the literature, plus locals who may be inspired by the general cultural buzz to explore a genre that hasn’t perhaps reached them in the past.
So the logical thing would be to programme work that is more easily engaging, and yet there is also the desire, with the resources of a festival behind you, to programme right at the cutting edge – after all, why should the visual arts dumb down just because someone may be looking in on the way back from a bit of Beckett? These two extremes of visual art don’t have to be mutually exclusive, and often more challenging work can become accessible to an audience less literate in its languages with a little help from some curatorial notes.
This is not to suggest that art needs panels and pages of explanation; quite the opposite, but at the main exhibition in the programme at Kilkenny, Something Else, curated by Aisling Prior, the challenge became first to find the art works, and then to identify who, among the eight artists involved, had made them. It will always be problematic to exhibit in a 17th-century building where you can’t move the existing paintings and furniture, or drill into the walls, but what began as a treasure hunt for art work gems by Isabel Nolan, Jo Anne Butler, John Byrne, Gary Coyle, Mick Wilson, Kevin Atherton, Ciaran Murphy and Corban Walker, quickly became frustrating as works were not individually numbered or labelled, and the list of exhibits more a teasing guide to what you couldn’t locate.
Within that, there were some exceptionally strong pieces. Isabel Nolan is an artist whose work has grown in strength over the past few years to achieve a powerful rhythm and sense of dialogue between its seemingly disparate elements. Here, the eclectic nature of her practice found the ideal setting amid the antique bric-a-brac of Rothe House. Her room in the exhibition was one of the most satisfying, as the certainties of past eras embodied by the setting were shown by her work to be fragmented and false. We may no longer be convinced of the solidity of our position or our goals, but in Nolan’s work there is still the possibility for beauty and wonder, even if these things are also revealed as fleeting and fragile.
There is beauty and wonder in Gary Coyle’s work too, though it does better when better installed, the same being true of Ciaran Murphy’s paintings, as well as Kevin Atherton’s Gallery Guide series of five DVDs, which had the unrealised potential to be one of the strongest elements of the exhibition. Downstairs, Atherton’s 2006 In Two Minds shows two large screens, facing one another, creating a space across which the artist stages a conversation that spans 28 years. On one screen, Atherton’s younger self (filmed at the Serpentine Gallery in 1978) talks about video art, and is interrogated by the older version of Atherton on the other screen. It is a meditation on time and growing old as much as it is on the development of video and performance art, and all the better for that.
Corban Walker’s hauntingly beautiful LED installation in the back courtyard was another work that sang in its setting, though not as literally as Mick Wilson’s Double Our Father , where speakers in the central courtyard filled the space with religious music. Knowing this artist, there is every reason to expect some form of ironic undercutting to this simple aural beauty though, short of phoning up the artist to find out, there was no way of discovering whether this was true, or what it may have been. John Byrne’s digital video Believers (2005) also played with religion, as the catechism was replaced by a clothed man and naked Renaissance model-type woman repeating, “I believe in the visual as the foremost articulation of meaning . . .” Something Else showed an intensely interesting and excellent selection of artists, and yet didn’t quite achieve the sum of its parts.
David Godbold’s The End of the Beginning of the Beginning of the End at the Butler Gallery is perfectly pitched for an arts festival audience (as well as the regular gallery-going crowd). It is a major installation of this artist’s work, where the usual suspects of religious and mythological imagery are drawn in an old master-like manner on tracing paper over the ephemera of old shopping lists, letters, notes and cards, and all undercut by witty, ironic one-liners completing the circle of the work. Here, the newer departures are large canvases, and there is the added frisson of the recently introduced blasphemy laws, laws that Godbold would be breaking should anyone decide they chose to be offended. A large disclaimer in the Butler’s entry room, spelled out blackmail-style with words and letters cut from newspapers, hints at the fun to follow.
The Museum of Broken Relationships at the Arts Office Gallery, and Weapons by Blaise Smith at the former Zavvi record store, again both hit the mark for a festival audience, each rewarding deeper engagement with further levels of thought and insight. On the other hand, Sinéad Ní Mhaonaigh’s exhibition at Ryan’s Electrical is a quirky and offbeat presentation of six or seven of this artist’s paintings, propped up behind glass in the counter unit of this small local store. The display is peppered with a couple of invitation cards for the exhibition and, while the artist states in the general festival catalogue that a central concern in her work is the condition of “being exiled on the edge of this space”, the overall sense is of something hastily and casually assembled. Ní Mhaonaigh’s work is delicately grave and meticulously spare, and in this instance the artist’s stated concerns, while present in the work, are detracted from rather than amplified by the installation.
Another major strength of the visual art element of festivals is the opportunities they give for showcasing the work of local studio groups. At Kilkenny, two exhibitions in particular stand out. Endangered (at both No 72 John Street, and Fennelly’s in Callan), shows the work of artists who work at the Endangered Studios, Callan. At the John Street exhibition, Caroline Schofield’s hanging felt piece, Unravelled Textile Drawing was particularly striking. Etaoin Holahan’s Crow Series and Bridget O’Gorman’s Allostatic Load were strong, while recent painting graduate Gary Tynan showed canvases that hint at an interesting career to come.
Not in the programme, but worth seeking out, Art by a group comprising young artists (some local, some from Co Mayo), demonstrated the energy of self-organised studio groups and exhibitions. Particularly engaging were Catherine Barron’s tiny painted vignettes, taken from a collection of family photographs the artist discovered dating from the 1950s and 1960s. Little moments of affectionate memory, they don’t set out to impress, but do so nonetheless.
Something Else, Rothe House, Kilkenny ends Aug 16; David Godbold, The end of the beginning of the beginning of the end, Butler Gallery, until Oct 4; The Museum of Broken Relationships, Kilkenny County Council Arts Office Gallery, until Aug 31; Blaise Smith, Weapons, Zavvi, MacDonagh Junction, ends Aug 16; Sinéad Ní Mhaonaigh, Ryan’s Electrical, ends Aug 16; Endangered, 72 John St, and Fennelly’s, Callan, ends Aug 16; Art, Tasha Interiors, ends Aug 16

endangered

Endangered Exhibition opening on Saturday 8th of August. We are also showing at 72 John Street for the festival

Woodstock Promenade

Woodstock Promenade

A Contemporary Public Art Event celebrating Woodstock Gardens

Sunday 26th July 2009

Woodstock Gardens, inistioge, Co Kilkenny are the site of a temporary public art project this July which will culminate in a unique event celebrating the Gardens and the people who created them. The project, which has been developed by Kilkenny County Council and the public art company Chrysalis Arts, will support a group of Kilkenny-based artists in gaining new skills in the field of public art, from initial ideas for artworks inspired by the site, through to their realisation using a wide range of creative processes.

The six artists selected to take part in the project are painter Gillian Campden, sculptor Philip Cullen, textile artist Caroline Schofield, media artist Deirdre Southey, artist Niamh White and writer Carmel Cummins. The artists will work with Chrysalis and Kilkenny County Council Arts Office to create a series of contemporary artworks which will be temporarily sited at Woodstock Gardens and the public will be invited to view them at a special event on Sunday 26th July.

“We have called the event Woodstock Promenade as we want to invite the public to come and take a gentle stroll through the gardens to view and interact with the artworks as people would have done in Victorian times and have continued to do since then”, commented Rick Faulkner, Director of Chrysalis Arts. “Some of the artworks will draw upon archival material and stories of life at Woodstock whilst others will be inspired by the plants and layout of the gardens.

Community participation has played an integral part in the development of the project and the artists have worked with schools and members of the community who have taken part in a range of workshop activities including painting, textiles and casting.

Swimmer Quilt

I showed this quilt at the Knit & Stitch in Dublin with Filament. I love adding dimension with found objects such as the drift wood and the rusted objects.

Images taken of my work at Sculpture in Context at the Botanics.

Sculpture in Context

On the 4th September the Sculpture in Context exhibition opens in the National Botanics Gardens in Dublin.
My work is called Reflected Growth and is sited within the Cactus House. It was exciting to see the textile pieces in Context instead of my work area where I often wondered why I was doing them.
The activity at the Botanics was fantastic with large machinery and sculptures being sited within the plants. Lucinda Jacobs has the most amazing evening gloves with pins dangerously sticking out in the Cactus House.
The exhibition is on till the 17th October 2008.

Swimmers

At the moment Im really lucky to be doing a residency in the Endangered Studios in Callan. My plan was to work with paint instead of falling into my comfort zone in fabric. I have been using acrylics and oils for the first time). As the time has gone on I realised that I have to combine paint with fabric and that canvas is too rigid and flat for me. Also that I really missed texture.

So I changed from canvas to fabric and in these paintings with the advice of Patrick (a truly amazing Endangered Painter) I painted pva (to prevent a fire) onto the fabric and then used oils.

I love the texture of the fabric with the paint and the fact that the paint hasn't obliterated the fabric.

Global

This quilt was recently shown in the IPS National Exhibition 'Links' in Kilkenny. I based it on the effects of human's influence on our environment. As a whole the piece caused me many problems with the structure I used but when it was photographed in sections it for me came into its own in the photo. Sometimes in Textiles I think you can go so far in a piece, be too committed and have put too much time into it to let it go,.....which I needed to do with this piece.

Journal Quilts 2008

January Journal Quilt.
There's layers of fabric cut back to create the body. The piece has hand stitches with wax over the top to create the textures The February Quilt depicts part of the Cathedral Floor using a rusted fabric and reverse Applique to create the patterns.

















March and April Journal Quilts look at the effects of Global Warming. The march quilt is painted with Acrylic Paint on Canvas and then machine and hand stitched. It includes painted bondaweb to give texture and debth to the piece.
The april quilt is Acrylic painted on cotton and embellished with fibres and stitch.
















All the 2008 Journal Quilts are 12 by 12 inchs.

rust & bags

Rust, Charcoal and Stitch are all included in these bags.

rust & things

I used this charcoal drawing as a start for the fabric piece seen here. The fabric had been rusted first and then layered with a charcoal sketch. Whats exciting about charcoal is that it doesnt all wash out so it becomes inherent to the piece.

In the piece there is a beautiful italian fabric that was given to me by an embroiderer.

The piece is worked with stitch to create a texture and background.

lifedrawing

My lifedrawing group are having a exhibition in the Watergate Kilkenny in March. We meet once a week to draw in the Ormonde College. The lifedrawings I am showing here are all in charcoal, my favourite medium. I love the spontanity of the medium altough it can be difficult to keep clean.

The background of this drawing was rubbed over a chequerboard surface to create the rough background effect.

This is my favourite drawing due to the spontanity of the piece. It took 10 mins and I can see all the lines I used.

I painted with Marie Perret in her Art Synthesis group for the past four days in the wonderful ballroom in Blanchville House. The space is fantastic for large work and the images shown here are from the painting called 'Being' . The Title could have been any of the following - Good/Evil, Inside/Out, Hate/Love but in the end I chose Being as it is inclusive of each title.

Bust made in Fabric working on the idea of the inside body on the outside.

side by side

I put in a proposal to make Textile Pots to the Crafts Council for the Side by Side Exhibition in the Hunt Mizeum in Limerick. The proposal was accepted and these are some of the images I have included in the Exhibition.