Laura McCafferty in Nottingham
Textile artist Laura McCafferty is showing new work in a solo exhibition at Nottingham’s Wallner Gallery (until 2 July)
The main focus of Lost is the Random Collection, a series of 11 screen printed and appliqued textiles based on a selection of visual snippets that McCafferty managed to salvage when she lost her collection of digital images. ‘They’re inspired by the idea of losing digital images and how we’ve turned into a lost generation as we spend all this time gathering images on our phones or laptops which then get lost,’ explains McCafferty. Using stitch, print and colour, she’s translated these images into textile to create a record of fragments of her personal life. Also included under the lost-memory umbrella are some works looking at what McCafferty brutally describes as ‘stuff’.
‘They’re depict random bits and pieces on a junkshop shelf and show what happens to your precious possessions when you pass away – they just turn into junk and lose all their sentimental value’.
The exhibition also shows McCafferty’s line drawings. She’s never bothered to exhibit these before as they are really part of her design process – like traditional tapestry cartoons – which she uses to create the screen print backgrounds for her textiles, but they are also artworks in their own right and show that McCafferty can more than hold her own as a fine artist as well as a textile artist.
www.lakesidearts.org.uk
