Boston Flora

Tag: the fabric of flowers

  • Monday, October 24, 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm – The Fabric of Flowers: The Embroiderer’s Floral, Online

    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.

  • Monday, October 3, 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm – The Fabric of Flowers: The English Rose in Life and Textiles, Online

    This October 3 talk on The English Rose in Life and Textiles is with Mary Schoeser, sponsored by The Gardens Trust. The talk is part of a 6-part Gardens Trust online lecture series, exploring how flowers and gardens have inspired textile artists, begins Mondays at 18:00 BST, equivalent to 2 pm Eastern time. Here in their latest series of talks they are taking a sideways view by exploring how gardens and flowers have influenced and inspired other arts and crafts. This first series of 6 will focus on textiles and explore some of the historical and technical aspects of embroidering, weaving and printing using floral designs on fabric. You will look at textiles from Elizabethan crowns to Edwardian table linen to see how flowers provided inspiration, taking in the prolific art embroiderers of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Then you will be brought bang up to date with two contemporary embroiderers with very different approaches to floral imagery who will share their design processes with us.

    This talk follows the fate of the rose as depicted in English textiles of the 19th century. Acknowledging two French Queens who helped to establish the royal connotations of this flower, it turns to Victoria and the impact of both the ‘Gardenesque’ and the Great Exhibition of 1851, particularly on members of the Arts & Crafts circle. The resulting ‘branch and net’ theory of design is seen in works by William Morris and others, including his daughter May, who also personifies the epithet, an ‘English Rose’.

    This ticket (click HERE to purchase) is for this individual session and costs £5, and you may purchase tickets for other individual sessions via the links below, or you may purchase a ticket for the entire course of 6 sessions at a cost of £24 via the link here.

    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.

    Mary Schoeser FRSA is a Senior Honorary Research Fellow at the V&A, Honorary President of the Textile Society and Patron of both the Bernat Klein Foundation and the School of Textiles. Mary has collaborated with many museums, including the Fashion Textile Museum, the V&A and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. As an historic textiles advisor she has worked with English Heritage, the National Trust and private house owners, and as a consultant archivist, with organizations such as Laura Ashley, Sanderson and the John Lewis Partnership. A prolific author of many books including World Textiles: A Concise History (2003); Sanderson: The Essence of English Decoration (2010) and Textiles: The Art of Mankind (2012). Her latest book is The Art of Wallpaper: Morris & Co. in Context (2022).

    Sanderson Chelsea Rose

  • Monday, September 26, 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm – The Fabric of Flowers: For Pleasure and Ornament, Online

    On September 26, Nicola Jarvis will present a Gardens Trust online talk on For Pleasure and Ornament. The talk is part of a 6-part Gardens Trust online lecture series, exploring how flowers and gardens have inspired textile artists, begins Mondays at 18:00 BST, equivalent to 2 pm Eastern time. Here in their latest series of talks they are taking a sideways view by exploring how gardens and flowers have influenced and inspired other arts and crafts. This first series of 6 will focus on textiles and explore some of the historical and technical aspects of embroidering, weaving and printing using floral designs on fabric. You will look at textiles from Elizabethan crowns to Edwardian table linen to see how flowers provided inspiration, taking in the prolific art embroiderers of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Then you will be brought bang up to date with two contemporary embroiderers with very different approaches to floral imagery who will share their design processes with us.

    ‘From early childhood, drawing has been my primary means of responding to the natural world and my garden. For my seventh birthday I was given the ‘Tailor of Gloucester’ by Beatrix Potter. This little book has enchanted and inspired me ever since. Potter’s watercolours of eighteenth-century costumes sowed a seed for my future passion and career in historic hand embroidery. Her close observation of nature rendered through drawing and painting is mesmerising for me.

    When creating a design for embroidery, I use drawing to study the characteristics of natural forms gathered from the garden, allotment or countryside. Making careful drawings helps to identify certain qualities in the various shapes and surfaces. Interrogating the colours, tones, textures and patterns through intricate drawing actions, enables me to penetrate beyond the physical layers to other surfaces and spaces that flourish in my imagination.

    Designing an embroidery of a plant, creature or garden scene is the point where I formulate and plan stitching techniques that will most effectively render particular qualities in the image, and it is at this stage that I attempt to strike a balance between botanical and/or biological accuracy and decorative fancy. For me a compelling embroidered artwork possesses this irresistible tension between accurate observation and stylisation’.

    This ticket is for this individual session (click HERE) and costs £5, and you may purchase tickets for other individual sessions, or you may purchase a ticket for the entire course of 6 sessions at a cost of £24 via the link here.

    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.

    Nicola Jarvis is an artist and teacher of hand embroidery. She trained at the Royal School of Needlework and received a Commendation from the Beryl Dean Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2018. After being awarded Overall Winner of the ‘Inspired by Morris’ exhibition at the William Morris Gallery (2010), she was invited to stage a solo show ‘The Art of Embroidery: Nicola Jarvis and May Morris’ at the gallery (2013). With funding from Arts Council England, Nicola toured the show to Arts and Crafts venues across England, including National Trust property Wightwick Manor in the West Midlands and Kelmscott House, Hammersmith. Alongside her colleague Lynn Hulse of Ornamental Embroidery, Nicola was instrumental in creating ‘The Needle’s Excellency’ exhibition of contemporary embroidery at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (2017) and ‘The Needle’s Art’ exhibition at the Bodleian Library, Oxford (2021-2022).

    copyright Nicola Jarvis