The New Art Centre is delighted to announce a major survey of pioneering British textile artist Ann Sutton (born 1935).
The exhibition will feature works from every decade of Sutton’s career, from her early days as a student at the Cardiff College of Art, through the 1960s and 1970s when she worked on both two- and three-dimensional textiles, and on to recent painted works, made after Sutton sold her looms in 2010 – a radical act for someone so feted as a textile artist and yet a move entirely in keeping with Sutton’s uncompromising attitude as an artist.
As Richard Howells, Emeritus Professor of Visual Culture at King’s College London, writes, Ann Sutton ‘has always been moving resolutely upstream, against the flow… but doing so with a heady combination of freedom and restraint.’
This survey exhibition is a response to the recent ‘discovery’ of craft as an art form in its own right (and not simply a subset of a wider field of ‘artistic making’) – something that Sutton has fought for from the outset of her career, preferring always to be described as a ‘maker’ rather than a ‘weaver’.
The exhibition will highlight Sutton’s endless experimentation as she pushes the boundaries of what can be ‘woven’ (plastic, linen, cotton and nylon monofilament) and how the necessary geometry of warp and weft can become the starting point for a wider enquiry into systems, pattern, order, balance and harmony. The show will also demonstrate her experimentation with colour, often in contrast to a more formal poetry of monochrome.
The scale of works on display will also run the full gamut of her oeuvre, from floor-to-ceiling hangings through to essays in structure only six centimetres square.
On From Weaving intends to bring Sutton’s work to a wider audience and is inspired by the acquisition in 2021 by Tate, through the New Art Centre, of four important woven pieces from the mid-1960s, as well as the recent display of her work in the Crafts Council newly opened galleries.
Some works in the exhibition are on loan, from the artist and from private collections, but the majority are for sale.
Ann Sutton’s work is held in numerous public and private collections, including Tate, Victoria & Albert Museum, Crafts Council, National Museum of Wales, Museum of Modern Art, Helsinki and National Museum, Stockholm
In 1991, she was awarded an MBE and was appointed a Senior Fellow at the Royal College of Art in 2005.
Dates: 27th November 2021 – 15th January 2022
Address: NewArtCentre,
Roche Court,
East Winterslow
Salisbury,
Wiltshire, SP5 1BG
Courtesy: New Art Centre, Wiltshire for images and text
Artworks in order:
1. Ann Sutton, Changeover (Serial Woven Studies), 1986, woven Textiles © the Artist.
2. Ann Sutton, Too Long For Its Space, 1993, woven Textiles © the Artist
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