January 14, 2021 - January 14, 2021
The 62 Group of Textile Artists presents The Skill of Narrative & Stitched Textiles, the third talk in their popular annual lecture series at the Fashion and Textile Museum.
This online lecture will introduce 62 Group members Emily Jo Gibbs and Richard McVetis and their respective projects The Value of Making and The Potential of Stitch.
The Value of Making (a series of hand stitched portraits of makers) by Emily Jo Gibbs
Emily investigates how by taking the time to slowly describe someone in stitch you convey your admiration. Celebrating people who make things by the investment of time in making their portraits, a quiet, thoughtful act of care and value.
Emily will describe how this project grew out of a collaboration with Bridget Bailey exploring how one might make a portrait of an Artist and evolved into the championing of people who make things for a living, depicting them through the tools that they use. Initially Emily chose seven contemporary Makers whose work she admired because of their design aesthetic, making skills and materiality, across a broad range of disciplines.
Katie Treggiden wrote, ‘there are things Emily is able to articulate through the physically invested work of stitching…. that might elude both writers and photographers’.
Gibbs will conclude by talking about her latest project that continues the conversation
The Potential of Stitch by Richard McVetis
This paper explores a 15-year fascination and obsession with a single stitch technique and how the expressive properties of this process have enabled Richard to visualise abstract concepts such as Time and Space.
It is through stitch and making that Richard investigate time and place. Using hand embroidery, he records his time through multiples of dots, lines, and crosses meticulously stitched. Each drawn mark or stitch is a mantra; the stitches become markers of lived time. This seemingly humble, inconsequential repetitive action often overlooked and dismissed as part of the mundane. Connotations of the domestic reduce these actions to the field of the home, of the amateur, for Richard, however, it restores a sense of order. It informs a more profound comprehension and connection to the world. There is intimacy in this labour-intensive way of making; the ritual and repetition create an in-depth focus and an internal Space-Time specific to the artist. This thinking will be explored through a series of McVetis’s recent artworks, whilst also referring to the practice of Agnes Martin and Vija Celmins, whose deep focus and skill helped translate feelings and the world around them.
