Colouring Outside the Lines
Hedgerow Birds, Abigail Brown (listing image, Group of birds, Abigail Brown)
Colouring Outside the Lines is a new exhibition on at Gallery II at the University of Bradford (26 June – 24 July)
As the title implies, this exhibition aims to explore work outside traditional boundaries. Curator Melanie Maddison says, it ‘seeks to make an active comment about the cultural myth that art is reserved for the elite and privileged’.
Textiles take centre stage here. Abigail Brown makes playful, life-like textile sculptures of birds and Morwenna Catt creates more aggressive textile heads of fantastical beasts. Naseem Derby has used her sewing machine to draw a series of wall hangings re-interpreting fairy tales. And then there’s Helen Musselwhite who makes wonderfully intricate paper sculptures of a fairy tale world which she traps under glass domes like a Victorian collector. Moving slightly away from the textile theme Heidi Burton produces moleskin journals which she doctors with her own illustrations, which the last exhibitor, Carolyn Mendelshon, is the only one to be truly out of the craft category being a photographer and film-maker.
www.brad.ac.uk/gallery
