Sea view from Redcar

My Walk this Week 228 – Fabric of the North Sea

My walk this week looks out at the North Sea from Redcar where I was working to install to of my audio interactive tapestries as part of the Fabric of the North exhibition at Kirkleatham Hall Museum. What a hectic day it was!

The North Sea

The work was successful and the exhibition looks excellent. If you are able to visit you will need to book a time slot via the Kirkleatham Hall Museum website, but if you cannot get there, the exhibition will also be online on the Fabric of the North website.

Once finished at the museum we took a short trip down to Redcar seafront. If the shot above appears slightly out of focus, you can blame the strong wind which is evident in the image.

I admit to staying in the car for most of this brief visit but other local inhabitants braved the weather and walked their dogs along a stretch of the beach I remember well from so many walks taken so many years ago.

No soundscape this week I’m afraid – just a short video clip of the scene to accompany the photos below.

 

Pink rose

My Walk this Week 209 – This Time Last Year

My walk this week is from this time last year when I was visiting Sunbury Walled Garden and gallery because this year I was due to have an exhibition of my audio interactive tapestry weaving. Hopefully the exhibition will happen next year instead. You can see some of my work towards this here.

A glimpse of the garden

The interactive aspect of the work was to have been tactile! While the work will still be textural – both weaving and audio – I am now having to think in a different way about how the interaction may be achieved as multiple people touching the same art works may be a problem. This may not be the result or legacy of the Coronavirus lock down but I have to consider that it may be a likely result of the pandemic and our need to maintain a social distance from each other the the things we interact with.

I may even need to consider the degree of interactivity I can provide through proximity sensors! While this changes some important aspects of my art work, I am gradually beginning to see it as an interesting challenge rather than being frustrated by it. Either way, texture will always be important to me and my work, both visually and aurally, so . . . watch this space (as they say) and in the meantime enjoy Sunbury Walled Garden.

Sunbury Gardens Soundscape

The soundscape media player does not show on the WordPress Reader, please visit the website to listen to the soundscape and view the images at the same time.

lavender and box

My Walk this Week 163 – Sunbury Walled Garden

My walk this week is around Sunbury-on-Thames walled garden. It is just a few minutes down the river from Hampton Court where my walk took place last week.

entrance

I was lucky with the weather and thoroughly enjoyed both these recent walks. The reason I was there was not for walking but to discuss the arrangements for an exhibition of my tapestry weaving and sound work to be held in the Sunbury Embroidery Gallery next year.Continue reading

rigging and masts

My Walk this Week 151 – The Music of Storm Hannah

My walk this week was short, cold and through the remnants of Storm Hannah – it was part of a sound and weave workshop I was running over the weekend. The first stage of the workshop was to go round Swansea Marina and listen to the sounds which featured what is known as the Marina Orchestra.

dark water

The leading orchestral instruments are the masts and rigging followed by the percussion of clanks and bangs, thumps and gloops of other maritime artefacts and of course the choppy water of the marina itself.

It was wild and cold and although we found a relatively sheltered spot to listen to the “symphony”, when we ventured down to the seafront, Continue reading

Swansea Festival of Stitch

A Centre of Art – Swansea 1 Festival of Stitch

As a tapestry artist and weaver I was keen to see as much as I could of the second biennial Swansea Festival of Stitch 2018 and managed to get to several of the city wide venues. My first port of call was Swansea Museum where some of the best quilting was to be seen.

Judy Stephens

The first four photos below are from the museum with others being from the Waterfront Museum, the Leisure Centre and the Grand Theatre. The festival is over now but there is much more art to look at in Swansea and I will be doing so over the rest of this week.

Uplands landscape

Punctuated By Ice at The Waterside

My walk this week has been around the lake at The Waterside – Felindre and seems to have been punctuated by ice. Indeed, the whole language and grammar of the posts has been dictated by the freezing icy conditions.

Icy Punctuation

Influenced as I am by the things I see and hear around me, I look at the light and shade, the patterns and textures, and I wonder what it would feel like to touch, to run my fingers along some of the surfaces of frozen water, hard ground lightly dusted with snow or old reeds and rushes from last year as they poke through the semi opaque sometimes mushy lookingContinue reading

Fighting ducks 5

Fighting Fit Like a Duck

In this, the middle stage of my walk this week around Brynmill Park in Swansea, I was entertained (not sure if that is the right word) by a pair of fighting fit ducks going at each other tooth and nail . . . or should that be bill and feather?

Fighting ducks 1

This was a very serious argument which carried on a lot longer than 8 still images can describe. I wonder what it was about? Continue reading

Bath City Centre

Bath – Reviewing the Walk

Bath Abbey sits, as you might expect, in the centre of the city. The Roman Baths are next to it and while I took a shot of the baths ceiling with its dome, I didn’t have the time to justify the cost of entry and I am sorry to say I didn’t go into the abbey either. So now I have an excellent excuse to revisit the place, and next time I will take my family – and if that’s not a good recommendation of the place, I don’t don’t what is!

Bath Abbey

So my original reason for going to Bath was to see the Contemporary Tapestry: Here and Now exhibition at the Holburne Museum. I was able to take a very enjoyable look at the city as well – its parks and architecture, its quiet and more noisy areas. On my home, prompted by my viewing of the tapestry exhibition,Continue reading