Group exhibition at Batsford Gallery with Adam Herbert, Catherine Marie-Longtin, House of Quinn and Kate Williams during London Craft Week May 2023. Above work pictured from left Sophie Giller, Kate Williams, House of Quinn, Kate Williams & Adam Herbert. Photo by Tim Crocker.
Above images clockwise 1. Adam Herbert, Catherine Marie-Longtin, Sophie Giller 2. House of Quinn 3. Kate Williams 4. Sophie Giller 5. Collaborative Wall 6. Catherine Marie-Longtin 7. Sophie Giller, Adam Herbert. Images by Tim Crocker except images 4 & 5 by Sophie Giller
Above images clockwise 1. Catherine Marie-Longtin 2. Sophie Giller, House of Quinn 3. House of Quinn 4. Kate Williams 5. Catherine Marie-Longtin 6. Adam Herbert 7. Adam Herbert 8. House of Quinn 9. Kate Williams 10. Adam Herbert, Catherine Marie-Longtin, Sophie Giller. All photography by Tim Crocker.
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A ‘state of the craft’ exhibition surveying contemporary quilt-making at the newly opened Batsford Gallery. Building upon a resurgence of interest in quilts as functional art, five artists with distinctive practices demonstrate the pliancy of a form which stretches from contemplative colour study to organic abstraction and the avant-garde.
A quilt is multilayered, complex in both material and meaning. It is intimate and public, autobiographical and communal. It can be didactic or celebratory; rhythmic and mathematical in form or freehand, figurative, functional. Quilts connect us all by threads and scraps to memory and narrative, to traces of community and history. They are a practice, a language, a material culture that can be endlessly revived, reworked and, as here, renewed.
The artists share a deep engagement with the materiality of cloth as the springboard for expression, present in each act of cutting, placing, layering and stitching which, finally, forms a coherent whole.
Catherine Marie Longtin draws on minimalist abstract art in a conversation between material and technique, concept and form, reference and creation.
Julius Arthur’s work blurs the boundary between art and function; objects bear meaning through their connection with the day-to-day.
Sophie Giller’s work emphasises process, labour, craft, care, domesticity, emotion and the social history of everyday materials.
Adam Herbert embraces and celebrates small mismatches of pattern which show the hand of the maker.
In Kate Williams’ large quilted panels, imagined architectural forms cast high-key shadows in desaturated, empty landscapes.
The Batsford Gallery is a new East London gallery space launched by Batsford Books, a leading publisher of art books, specialist in textiles and applied arts and originator of the Batsford Prize. The bright, airy space is located between Broadway Market and Columbia Road, and showcases work by leading artists, makers and designers.
How you mean to go on reactive dyes, direct dyes, thread, linen, wadding. Above image by Tim Crocker, below Sophie Giller
In her book ‘Fabric’, Victoria Finlay suggests that sewing is a connecting and joining of ideas, moments and thoughts. The artist was reading this book while also undergoing therapy, and evaluating relationships, emotions, and personal connections. These quilts take on bodily forms which grow outwards, and consider how sewing can be physical therapy through the repetitive and contemplative acts of piecing scraps of fabric and colour by joining, cutting, creating compositions, and slow stitching. A set of two, double-sided hanging banner-like quilts. Each banner approx 52cm x 201cm.
Empathy runs deep 205cm x 230cm, reactive dyes, linen, thread, wadding. First and final image by Tim Crocker, rest below by Sophie Giller
Blue quilt for our collaborative wall
Sophie Giller 