This is the last talk in the Gardens Trust’s online series exploring how flowers and gardens inspired textile artists.
This ticket (purchase HERE) is for this individual session and costs £5. Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days prior to the start of the talk, and again a few hours before the talk. A link to the recorded session (available for 1 week) will be sent shortly afterwards.
Lecturer Janet Haigh says:
‘During recent Covid times, I returned to my original practice of stitching flowers onto fabric usually seen as garden portraits. Re-researching my old workbooks, I found delight and reassurance revisiting these earlier drawings, designs and techniques. I particularly enjoyed the hidden symbolism within my “Flora” series, which was inspired by the lengths that man has gone in the attempt to control and manipulate nature, and both the beauty and folly of the results. I imagined a journey from the Roman goddess “Flora”, an earthly “Paradise” and via “Tulipomania” to “Current Breeding Objectives”.
Recently I have stitched real bunches of garden flowers gifted to me during last year’s lockdowns. Made as celebratory embroideries during such difficult times, imagine my shock and utter delight to find that the ‘meanings’ of the beautiful Dahlias, Anemones, Hellebores and Achilleas, when checked against my much-thumbed dictionaries of the arcane “Language of Flowers”, are – instability, sickness, scandal and war’.
Janet Haigh studied Fashion and Textile at Liverpool art College in late 1960’s. Initially a fashion and textile designer in London, she took the post of Senior Lecturer in Textile Design at Bristol UWE. Later becoming a Senior Research Fellow developing textile techniques for other substrates. Janet then developed Heart Space Studios in Bristol, as a hub for teaching and exhibiting local textile practitioners. She has published many stitching books including The Embroiderer’s Floral (2002). Her work now is designing and making varied stitched textile-based work for exhibitions, commissions and publishers, and is at present developing a business to sell Giclee prints of her stitched works.
