Unravelling Textile Connections

Textile Connections is a new group of textile artists with members from Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire. The group was formed by students who completed the Creative Stitch Advanced Stitched Textiles course with tutor Mary McIntosh and include Anna Ladds, Christine Speller, Mary McIntosh, Nicola Wrigley, Rosemary Tyler, Sarah Moran and Virginia Ashberry. 

This is their first major exhibition. The theme of ‘Textile Connections’ was chosen as the title for the exhibition with each member interpreting it in her own unique style. Within both individual artists’ and group exhibits, there is a wide range of stitched and quilted wall hangings and innovative 3D work. One features a series of 6″ squares, each with a touch of turquoise, and connected in some way. Another is a display of tactile ‘spheres’ with a wide range of themes which visitors are invited to handle and there is a wonderfully inventive series of textile ‘boxes’. Plus, of course, artistic tote bags.

One of my mother's tapestries showing an 
18th century Dutch interior

I had seen a flyer in the Apex which simply announced the display in the Guildhall from July 2^nd to 6^th and although I am interested in all branches of art, the idea of textile art brought to instant mind my Suffolk sister, Heather, who was a past mistress in the various branches of textile art following on, she and I always imagined, from our mother’s talents which had created masses of crochet and tatting in her youth. My mother became a devotee of tapestry-making in her older years; in fact, her tapestry art became her passion, fulfilling much of her leisure time from her sixties on.

Once seen as a creative backwater probably because of the mundane association with domestic chores and diurnal family demands, textile art is increasingly emerging as Real Art, as individually striking, artistic and gifted as that produced by pen, pencil, paint, pot. The Guildhall Exhibition bears that message multiplied many times in a variety of interesting forms though an observation by one exhibitor underlines the popular conception that textile art is “women’s work.”! She said that male visitors in Bury chiefly tended to be the captive husbands of those exhibiting.

A soft, cloth 'vase' in the exhibition

One tapestry side of a screen containing
two tapestries. Shows a female artist.

ale visitors in Bury tended to be just the  occasional captive husband of someone exhibiting.