Mounting Work for my Exhibition

I'm spending this week getting ready for my exhibition. It's less than 2 weeks away! I have been working hard and so have a plan's chest drawer full of textile pieces which need mounting up:

Because the raw, uneven edges of the fabric, and the slight unsquareness, are an important part of the work, I surface-mount each piece onto a stretcher, which I create myself, with John's help. The first time I showed my textiles work, as part of my Orchard Square residency, I bought a big roll of lovely raw cotton from Whaley's, to make the canvas stretchers. Luckily, it seems I have just enough left to do what I need.

That first time, John made all the stretchers for me from scratch, which took ages, but we have now discovered a company where we can buy individual, ready-cut, wooden pieces at different lengths, so it's a much quicker business to put them together. Here's the first one, hot off the press, so to speak:

We have to hand-stretch each one, which is a bit of a tedious business. Pulling the cotton tight to keep up the tension, ready for stapling, makes your fingers hurt, but we'll get it done. 

After that, I use Bondaweb to attach the work to the stretcher fronts (plus a little stitching here and there for the larger work, just to be on the safe side). They look so lovely once they're done. Here's the latest piece I finished early last week, now all mounted up and looking posh and ready for the exhibition:

The show, called Unbound, opens at the Gage Gallery, at KIAC in Kelham Island (Sheffield S3 8DB) on Dec 7th. I am sharing the space with 3 other women artists. Here's a short bit about each of us:

Lynne Chapman
Lynne hand-stitches into fine layers of textile, building up areas of intense colour and texture. Her most recent work is inspired by petroglyphs: the frayed, ambiguous glimpses of ancient stories, the idea that we leave behind an echo, consciously or unconsciously.

Helen Purdie
Helen’s precise and colourful studio paintings and her gestural plein air works are influenced directly by the world around her. As a recently, late-confirmed autistic woman, Helen will also be exhibiting a new autobiographical piece exploring the challenges and beauty of her day-to-day human interactions.

Katie Jamieson
Katie chooses to use materials that have the qualities of softness and absorbency. She is constantly responding to the organic nature of the work. It reflects the balance between creation and destruction; building layers up and knocking them back down again until the whole piece emerges.

Lisa Wallbank
Lisa's whimsical approach to assemblage presents curiosities, fragments and debris from the toybox, in amusing and puzzling combinations. Each artwork invites the viewer to construct a story, but obvious narratives are confounded by details that just won't fit. Or will they?