Exhibitions at The National Botanic Garden of Wales, Carmarthenshire

Well, its been a busy few weeks.  Last weekend four textiles exhibitions and a symposium that I've been directly involved in either curating, coordinating or exhibiting in, opened in and around Carmarthenshire.  I'll do separate blog posts for each venue as I have lots of photos to share with you.

The first two shows to open were both at The National Botanic Garden of Wales.  In the gallery was '10 - ten years of textiles, ten years of growth' celebrating the achievements of graduates and staff from the BA Contemporary Textiles course at the West Wales School of the Arts, where I teach woven textiles.  The show was curated by Paula Philips Davies, the course leader.





I LOVE this large scale knitted artwork by Kelly Jenkins!

 In the grounds of the Gardens I coordinated a show for Fibre Art Wales, a group I've been a member of for about four years.  The exhibition is entitled 'Exposed: textiles in the open', which is the first time the group has created an exhibition for the outdoors.  We felt very privileged to be given free reign to create and place artworks anywhere within the grounds of he gardens.  For most of the group it was the first time we had to think about making work to with stand the elements.  We were also delighted that for the first time our patron Mary Lloyd Jones contributed a piece of work to the show.

Below are some images of my piece for the show entitled 'Vista'.  Cotton and silk threads have been laminated in glass, a development on the cast acrylic 'Resonate' sculptures I have been working on for several years.  Whilst acrylic is robust enough to withstand extreme weather, it is vulnerable to scratching, so for this kind of application I needed to translate the process into glass.  This is the first large scale piece I have made of this ilk and I'm really pleased with the results and it's great to see it in situ.  A huge thank you is due to Innovative Glass Products for their support in making this work.



And here are a couple of images of artworks by some of the other members of Fibre Art Wales members:

'Miss Willmott: a memoir' by Lisa Porch

'Through a Glass' by Ruth McLees

'The Ghosts of a Weed Garden' by Kathryn Campbell Dodd



Hope you manage to get to see the shows!