Lost in Lace
Lost in Lace is a new Crafts Council exhibition, made in collaboration with Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. It’s all about lace, but not necessarily as you know it. Curator Lesley Millar explains that the exhibition ‘explores the structures and meanings of lace and asks questions about how we divide space, both physical and architectural. Here artists are using materials ranging from crystals to phosphorous threads, from polymers to video, from Tyvek to black wool and white cotton, from hand-cut muslin to Jacquard punch-cards… The threads within lace connect one decorative element with another to forma network. Lace networks can be both complete – as with a finished work, but also have the possibility to make continuous connections. They can spread like a virus, surrounding but not enclosing space, forming boundaries and allowing access through.’
So let’s go and get lost…
Here’s an installation pic of Lacing Space by Piper Shepard with Line by Diana Harrison in the background. Shepard’s starting point was a Point de Gaze style lace from the BMAG collection.
Atelier Manferdini’s Inverted Crystal Cathedral is made up of 1,000 cables each one studded with crystals. Click here for a slideshow of the piece’s installation
Up close it looks like this.
Here’s the whole thing.
This is Annie Bascoul’s Moucharabieh and Jardin de lit, lit de jardin. Bascoul says that she wants this work to be ‘rare and precious, always beautiful and poetic. For the suspended ‘bed’— Jardin de lit, lit de jardin — I’ve used materials which refer to bedding: the white down duvet, which evokes the erotic poetry of Béroalde de Verville, whose text is on the ground underneath the bed. White and gold are for me the colours of light, beauty and ambiguity’.
Here’s Tamar Frank’s A thin line between space and matter which with a few finishing touches transforms into this…
Here’s Michael Brennand-Wood working on his piece Lace the Final Frontier. His aim is to create a ‘military lace’ taking pattern inspiration from lace (of course), but also weaponry and the Rorschach text.
Here’s Diane Harrison working on Line, constructed from stitched layers of dyed cloth which are then bleached, burned and chemically printed.
Here’s Lost In Lace’s curator Lesley Millar popping in to say hello.
This is a view through Liz Nilsson’s The Latticed Eye of Memory, a series of layers presenting a combination of viscose, satin, embroidery canvas and thread. ‘Lace has for a long time inspired me because it has an ethereal nature not unlike that of memory itself.’ Nilsson explains, ‘For the Gas Hall at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, the shadows, cast by one fabric onto another or to the surrounding area, are reminders of the transience of memory and experience’.
And here’s a few pics of Chiharu Shiota’s After the Dream being installed.
The oversized dresses are captured within a random web of threads. The use of garments, the artist explains, ‘always refer to the clothes as a second skin, which carry the memories of the people who wore these clothes.’
Lost in Lace: New approaches by UK and international artists, is at the Gas Hall, Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery until 19 February 2012
http://lostinlace.org.uk/
