Lockdown lift-off is celebrated in central London with public art
The Piccadilly Art Takeover
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Art Textiles
Four rooms defined by rugs
Long gone are the days when the floor was the ignored dimension of a room, a neutral offset to enhance other design elements. Today, handmade rugs have staked out their claim as effortless centrepieces of an interior. They frequently form the starting point for...
New Designers 2013: Beautiful Brutalism
Denna Jones The brethren of Brutalism tend to be a raucous and bullish tribe. Built of concrete in solid, spare, monolithic forms, the mid-twentieth century modern architectural style known as Brutalism polarises opinion in the same way knuckles tattooed with Love and...
New Designers 2013: a Star is Discovered
Denna Jones "Pop! pop! pop!" Daniel Beckford positions his arms to hold an imaginary rug tufting gun, pumps his hands, and delights in providing verbal support for his impromptu demonstration of how he placed scattered pot shots of wool across a quadrant of his degree...
Outsider Art exhibition in London features textile artists
The conceptual underpinnings of Outsider Art are problematic. Who's "in" and who's "out" is just one of the questions no one has adequately defined. Your scribe is puzzling this conunudrum for multiple publications, so will say no more for now other that to present...
Two dead kings and one long tapestry
Like the buses your scribe waits impatiently and then two dead kings come along at once. Archeologists confirmed last week the skeleton found in a hasty grave beneath a Leicester car park is that of Richard III. And this week? Stitchers in the Channel Island of...
Craftica exhibition at Gallery Libby Sellers
Skin deliberately denuded of hair meant to be there is eery. (And no, your scribe does not mean the prosaic human routine of daily depilation.) Transmogrified skin is even more eery. Hairy, hairless, sleek or scaly, flayed skin used for purposes other than intended...
Apocalypse Now? Cross-stitch tapestries by Cordeiro & Healy
Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions? Jared Diamond's question is the title of Chapter 14 in his book Collapse. He posits four sequential steps to explain why societies mismanage resources and fail to thrive or survive. First they fail to anticipate the...
Fabulous textile Christmas stocking stuffer under a fiver? Artisan du Chocolat!
Chocolate is your scribe's Achilles heel. Never ever ubiquitous cheap chocolate, but always luxury dark chocolate requiring a mindful journey to the byways of Chelsea and Artisan du Chocolat. Founded by artisan chocolatier Gerard Coleman (famous for his creation of...