Well, maybe good things really do happen in three's....
Firstly I'm really delighted to announce that on the 29th April 2009, I was one of four recipients of a
Creative Wales Ambassador Award from the Arts Council of Wales. 'This new award scheme is part of the Arts Council of Wales's Beacon scheme for individual artists and organisations. Funded by the Welsh Assembly Government, the aim of the Creative Wales Ambassadors Awards is to recognise significant individual achievement in the arts, to raise the profile of Welsh culture outside of Wales and to provide financial support to enable the artist to develop a new programme of work.'
Exciting creative projects lie ahead of me now, that I may not have been able to readily explore if it were not for the opportunity afforded to me by this Award. I am looking forward with enthusiasm to getting started with a new body of work which will see me creating more ambitious, larger scale works for exhibition in my host organisations,
Ruthin Craft Centre and
Brown Grotta Arts in the USA. Amongst the other threads of my work, I will also be forging closer links with architectural design research partners and working with Welsh mills on a design-art collection, which will all be complimented by my ongoing curatorial and education activity in Wales.
Secondly, I have just been awarded a commission to produce a 'vessel' to be presented to the Australian Cricket delegation when the first Ashes match is played in Cardiff this summer.
And lastly, I am delighted that I have once again been accepted to exhibit at Origin, the Crafts Council Show at Somerset House in October later this year.
Aside from all that excitement, this last month really has been a flurry of activity. Alongside my usual teaching on the BA Contemporary Textiles course in the
West Wales School of the Arts, I have being running a series of
'Architextiles' workshops in the
Welsh School of Architecture with
Dr Wayne Forster. This has been an immensely enjoyable challenge encouraging first and second year architecture students to explore and draw upon the textile fundamentals of colour, pattern, texture and structure, to generate conceptual architectural proposals for a 'wonder wall'.
After appealing for help with my Architextiles research on the
Weave-tech forum, I had a huge number of emails from interested weavers around the world into this activity, so I'm intending to record this series of workshops in a forthcoming blog once the project is completed.
I am also continuing to work on my first curation project 'The Warp and the Weft', which will be a group exhibition at the
Oriel Myrddin Gallery in Carmarthen in 2010. I will be co-curating this with Meg Anthony, the Oriel Myrddin curator. The concept of the exhibition is to highlight 'unexpected' woven textiles. Exhibitors may use 'unexpected' aesthetics or perhaps integrate 'unexpected' technology into their textiles. At the end of this month Meg and I will be visiting the
Crafts Study Centre in Farnham is select a piece by Peter Collingwood from the recently acquired archive of his work.
As for this weekend, after giving a talk on my work to the Bristol Embroidery Guild, I am looking forward to squeezing in a visit to
COLLECT and the
Stroud International Textiles Festival......
Until next time..... L x
