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.

Continue reading →

“Basketry: Rhythm, Renewal & Reinvention is a visual slice across contemporary UK basket making. There are some 35 makers spilling over all three galleries at Ruthin Craft Centre. The exhibition shows what is being made today – and by whom – across basketry’s beautiful variety of shapes, materials and weaves.” Jane Audas, August 2021

Amanda Fielding, then Curator of the Craft Council Collection, wrote in 1999 for an exhibition titled Interwoven: Objects, Baskets, Forms “as the full title of this exhibition suggests, the term basket is too constraining to describe the plethora of objects to find their way under its umbrella…… there is more to contemporary baskets than orthodox containers and ways of making.” Now some two decades on Basketry: Rhythm, Renewal & Reinvention continues and updates that trajectory of investigation to promote and extend the understanding and appreciation of contemporary basketry.

Basketry is a broad church of intelligent diversity; from the meticulous observance of ancient lore to ‘out-there’ iconoclastic revolutionary forms that challenge both materiality and function. There are of course those who make beautifully woven contemporary vessels informed by the rhythm of tradition; the seasonal pattern of the growth of materials, harvesting and making. Of these some techniques are steeped in history of specific use, others are renewed and adapted for today. While some use and reinvent technique as a springboard to push boundaries and celebrate innovation. Continue reading →