I went to see the exhibition of textile pieces by Rozanne Hawksley at the Ruthin Craft Gallery yesterday and would really recommend it. There’s a very good review of the exhibition in a-n magazine so I won’t offer much more here than a few personal responses. It’s a long time since an exhibition had such a powerful effect on me and though the reasons why are still rather disconnected in my mind, here are some initial thoughts.
Firstly, much of her work is about suffering and loss and as such is almost bound to have an emotional impact. The piece entitled ‘I will fly south .. for Matthew‘ begun in the year her son died of cancer aged 37 is incredibly moving. Like many of the pieces this one is made of tiny bird bones and a web of taut threads. It’s exquisite - so finely executed - and it is this careful placing of each bone and thread that, for me, contributes much to its power.
In the book by Mary Shoeser written to accompany the exhibition, this precision and attention to detail in Hawksley’s work is summed up by one of her students at Goldsmith’s College -
‘… she impressed on me the importance of precision when you are working, that a line cut in fabric should be as precise as a drawn line.’
I came away resolving to work with more care and to give time to line and thread after years spent experimenting with texture.
In many of the pieces she uses white vintage leather gloves. In one seried entitled ‘Continuum ‘a number of these are nailed to pieces of wood through the palm. The glove is slashed open and disorted - sometimes there is red fabric or dye in the gash. It was disturbing as well as moving (the palms of my hands feel strange just thinking about it) but, like much of her work what really struck me was the careful and exquisite execution - the tiny stitches on the gloves , the placing of each finger. In ‘Pale Armistice‘ made for the Imperial War Museum in 1991, again it was the stitching on the gloves that struck me most of all - the painstaking hours involved in their contruction and the care of the maker and sense of time passing that they carry with them as a result.
Pale Armistice
This attention to detail is something that so often we seem to have lost; we want to make something that can be finished in a day and then move on to something else. Almost every week I hear the same thing from people who come on a course desperate for some time to be creative - ‘I have to finish it today or I’ll never find time to finish it at all.’ I often find myself afraid to gives things time. There’s a voice in my head telling me that I’m not getting anywhere if I don’t keep producing. I’m going to slow down.
Many of the glove pieces are lighter, almost funny, certainly clever. This is a woman who must have the most incredible collection of fabric fragments, lace, beads, jewels, braid and bones. The photos of her attic studio are an inspiration in themselves - a vindication for all of us who have carefully stored boxes of treasures that will one day be perfect for what we are making.
The stories that she tells in the short film made for the exhibition made an impression on me too. She was in her late 40’s when she took a course which changed her life. Having told her second husband that something was missing in her life, that there was something that she needed that she couldn’t find, she said that this textiles course with David Green was like someone giving her a key and opening a door and saying ‘look, here it is.’ Wow! What a course. What a testimony to the fact that it is never too late to begin a whole new thread in our lives.
