Fresh Air

Liz is taking part in "Fresh Air" an outdoor sculpture exhibition in Quenington in June. www.freshairsculpture.com. Her work was photographed at the venue last week for the catalogue.

The piece is called "Between and Through" and references trees and the shapes made from the spaces between them. It consists of three lengths of painted and stitched cotton organdie suspended from a frame. The joy of organdie is that it is fine but strong and can be seen through and has been Liz's preferred fabric for some years. 

Liz Harding

A feast of beads in Marrakesh

Linda always returns from her visits to Marrakesh with fresh treasures and photos full of rich colours.

This time, a basket full of  beads especially caught her eye. She says she found them in '... one of my favourite shops in the Medina - just crying out to be strung. The proprietor usually asks me to share his lunch!'

Looking and talking clearly pays off!

Hellebores

Seeing Hellebores in my garden under an ash tree, delicate and subtlely coloured, surely made me think Bloom!

 Fresh shapes and pastel colours to explore? Perhaps a new departure for me.

Margaret Robbie

Moss cups

Walking in Kingston Lacey woods, I came across these beautiful ‘moss cups’. I don’t think I’ve seen these since my childhood.

Carolyn Sibbald 

Linda's flowers

Linda has been experimenting further with flower shapes seen on her many visits to Marrakesh for our exhibition Bloom in the Gardens Gallery, Cheltenham, in September.

Here, in these two examples shown tacked to a window to highlight their transparancy, she has explored the use of stitch with paper coated with beeswax and produced some interesting effects with overlaps along the way.

In the last example, she has returned to her previous work stitching on paper and has added some developments with vaious weights of wool and thread on felt.

Linda Babb

Gardens Gallery, Cheltenham

The group went to see The Gardens Gallery where our next exhibition 'BLOOM' opens on September 4th this year. We found a lovely light and airy space where we will be showing our latest work for a week.

Tulips

These early tulips are brightening up the garden and they are going to be used to continue my exploration of close up images of blooms. Instead of working on my usual organdie I am using recycled paper, in fact an old piece of work, now painted over with gesso soon to reflect the glowing colours of flower details.

Early blooms

Enticed by the wonderful weather last weekend and with our Bloom exhibition in Cheltenham in September in mind, I took photographs on two walks of the first hints of spring in the hedgerows and along the edge of a local wood. There were many examples of blooms to choose from. The extraordinary weather had encouraged flowering so early in the year.

There were many springtime yellows, first of all that lovely, optimistic early buttercup, the Celandine.

There were miniature daffodils on the edge of a wood. Did they escape from a nearby garden or were they deliberately planted? 

And then, there were banks of primroses, often seen from the car with no chance of stopping to photograph so shown here a single clump just coming out on the edge of the same wood. 

Walking further on in the sunshine, I found delicate blue common field (?) speedwell, 

and a few clumps of deep purple crocuses.

Then there was something quite different - maybe the earliest of all flowers to appear - on hazel bushes growing freely beside a lake in the Cotswold Water Parks. 

This bush was spectacularly covered in catkins (the male flower), now nearly at the end of their flowering period. The catkin is of course a flower but so different in character from most others and the hazel is the most hard-working of bushes. It has to produce vast quantities of pollen to ensure at least some is wind-blown to fertilise the tiny red female flowers - hence the long muli-flowered catkins. 

Of all these flowers, I suspect the one that may finally find its way into work for the exhibition is the celandine but time will tell. 

Margaret Robbie

Current work

More small pieces for 'Bloom'. There will be six eventually based on close up images of hydrangeas, tulips and hellebore.

Off Piste

Margaret reports that she is working 'off piste' at the moment for a different exhibition she is taking part in at Swindon Museum and Art Gallery at the end of May. The brief for this exhibition asks participants to explore images from the Museum's large archive of local photographs and postcards in their work.

So far, she has been exploring several different manipulations (in Adobe Photoshop Elements) of photos taken in the early part of last century and chosen from the archive. These focus especially on the Railway Village area of the town. This image, one of several, is entitled Dinner Time GWR works. Sadly no further details are available to credit the photographer.

First of all, the black and white photo was colourised.

This then gave rise to this thought, involving selecting and cropping of the part of the image showing working men walking home to lunch,

 and ultimately, after further selecting, copying, flipping and layering, to this possible image.

The original photo gave rise to many thoughts, not least how times have changed from a life which would be unimaginable to us today. The men are walking, presumably home for lunch and not cycling, riding a motor bike or driving a car. They are all wearing suits and bowler hats or cloth caps. There are very clear social class demarcations, with those on the shop floor in cloth caps and the managers and professionals in bowlers. Last, but certainly not least, in the stream of people going home from work there are no women to be seen at all.

Next, for this piece, thoughts turn to what to do with the image, for instance, how much to reference the social class and gender differences identified in the photograph?

*This is the way Margaret says she usually works: having a broad thought of what she wants to achieve, taking or choosing photos from her own archives and then creating a series of digital images and possible interpretations. Later, ideas are further developed with consideration of fabric and stitch.

Margaret Robbie

Linda Babb gathering ideas

In these sketchbook pages, Linda shows how she has been gathering a few colourful ideas for our forthcoming exhibition in September entitled Bloom. In these experiments, she has used stitch and various weights of paper, some of it waxed.

These idea are developments from Linda's many visits to Marrakesh.

Linda Babb

January Challenge

Inspired by 'Bloom' Corinne was one of 64 million artists who took part in the January drawing challenge