Five artists/makers get together.

Jan Downes, Brenda Factor, Stuart Faulkner, Barbara Rogers and Catherine Rogers.

Black and white photographs (c.1933) taken by Richard A C Rogers.
Printed from the original negatives by Catherine H Rogers

Composing Earth and Sky brings together sculptural works that explore concepts inspired by natural environments and our personal connection to them.  

Concerned with humankind’s detachment from the natural world, the artists use materials that are formed in the earth and grow towards the sky to embody this dilemma.  With their hands and hearts, they work with their material’s innate qualities to co-create forms that respond to their own environment and personal stories.  These are inextricably linked to their landscape - both earth and sky.

Sally Campbell’s  Running With Stitches exhibition celebrates the art of hand-stitching. From ancient times in India, women would stitch together and patchwork cloth from rags. Kantha embroidery from Bengal became the most famous. You can see the running stitch on my handwoven quilts, cushions and scarves from Bihar, Bengal and Bhuj in Gujarat.

The negative photographs used in this exhibition were taken by an unknown group of about four men on a short visit to the Blue Mountains around 1930. It appears that they shared a camera to photograph each other posed at various tourist sites they visited on a clear sunny day in the mountains.

In a process of adding and subtracting, masking and revealing, textile artist and designer, Barbara Rogers, incorporates innovative shibori techniques with other traditional resist-dye processes in her unique artworks to create subtly varied patterns and rhythms that work in harmony with the cloth.

As our world is overwhelmed with issues arising from fast fashion / textiles industries, an individual response is to use what we have - repurposing, recycling, circulating existing materials. The idea of making do - using readily available materials for clothing and objects for warmth, protection or to beautify a home has been central to women’s domestic craft practices for centuries and has been central to Williamson’s practice for the past decade. This exhibition shows ‘new’ work created from waste, excess materials, archived designs, old clothes, or other materials.

What can be done with a shirt - any old shirt, a white shirt, a discarded, coloured or patterned; a large or small shirt; worn, torn or damaged shirt; plain, frilly or lightweight or heavy.

In this show Tina Matthews presents kinetic sculptures constructed from found and reworked materials that include steel and copper, wood, silk threads, glassine and shellac. These joyful sculptures perform in any breeze that passes and have a parallel life in the shadows they throw on all surrounding surfaces.

Exhibition by Alison Muir and Warwick Tonkin of textiles to wear, textiles to hang and textiles to carry.