Louise Nason Artist in residence.
Saturday 27th June.
I visited the Chersey Museum. The museum has a wonderful collection of historic fashion dating from the 16th Century. www.chertseymuseum.org.uk
I went to see a demonstration being giving by Bridget Strowbridge on corset’s.
She has a wealth of knowledge of historical corsetry. Having worked for the English national opera as a costume designer. She also taught for many years at the London College of Fashion.
The demonstration, looked at a original corset from 1890. Bridget showed us how it would have been constructed. by showing a replica block pattern she had made. She then made an exact copy of the original to work out the construction. Interestingly the seams ran diagonally to the boning of the corset.
Biddy was very interesting and I learnt a lot about historical costume construction.
At the end of the demonstration I was lucky enought to try the corset on. It looked beautiful and held me up very straight but you could feel your bones being squeezed in and it was easy to realise why so many lady’s fainted!
I would encourage you all to visit the chersey Museum as it has a wonderful collection and you can get to see things from the archive easily.
Louise Nason Artist in Residence.
Here are a few images from my adult weaving workshop.
The workshop had a great response and some lovely outcomes.
Everyone one started off by looking at St George’s Church and I begun with some drawing. The group used their images to inspire their weaving. Everyone took a turn at weaving on the table loom and they also completed some lovely individual card weaving.
The day was very popular and I have had many request for a second adult workshop in the autumn.
Jane Ponsford visual arts organiser St George’s Arts
As this blog didn’t start at the very beginning of Louise’s residency, I want to post up some images from the first few weeks of her time with us. The project began with a launch exhibition where we were introduced to some of Louise’s previous work much of which is extremely delicate and where she described in more detail her intentions for the present project.
Louise Nason Artist in residence.
The residency began at the end of April. Two months later and the time has seemed to fly-by.
It all began with the building of the loom. A construction which took a day and 3 people to build partly because of the weight but also the size. The loom is a solid wood maxwell countermarch floor loom. It seems very much at home in the space at st George’s as do I, now I have had the time to settle in.
The residency began with a launch exhibition which had a lot of visitors and set me off to a good start.
After several days of threading the warp, I began weaving a set of linen samples.
Weaving can be a slow process where a lot of time is spent preparing the loom and threading the warp before weaving can begin.
Last week two successful workshops took place. One a very short introduction to spinning with a small group of children from my old primary school. it was good to make a connection with a school which sparked my enthusiasm for art.
The second was a adult weaving workshop where the group took it in turns to weave on a table loom drawing on influences of the church. They also completed individual card weaving with a variety of conclusions some using found yarns which had a personal meaning to them.
I look forward to teaching other groups however daunting it may seem now!
Jane Ponsford: visual arts organiser
The purpose of this blog is to focus and reflect on our two main activities this year, the artist residency and r and d for our organisational development. So posts to the blog will be made both by me and by Louise Nason our artist-in-residence for 2009.
Earlier in the year when we posted a call out for site specific / responsive proposals for the residency we were overwhelmed by the variety of approaches put forward. In the end the committee selected a maker whose proposal was deceptively straightforward; to put up a loom in the studio space at St George’s and make work which responded to the materials, colours and light of the building. In the few weeks since the residency period started Louise has settled into the space and has started the process of building the framework of her project. ‘Building’ was initially a literal description as the floor-based countermarch loom had to be constructed in the space and then the warp threaded on to it. A film of this was shown at the launch event and (despite it’s slapstick moments with much scratching of heads and consulting of plans) it has set a theme of concentration and process which has continued as the residency has unfolded. Watching these developments I have been reminded of another blog I have been reading over the year; ‘Making a slow revolution’, http://makingaslowrevolution.wordpress.com which reflects on the collaboration between Helen Carnac and Craftspace. The discussions in Helen’s blog seem very relevant to this project, in their focus on the slow, necessarily unhurried application of skills learnt through doing.
