Alison Bell

1 Mar 2009 in Visual Arts & Crafts

Sea Silks

EILEEN BELL hears the story behind textile artist Alison Bell’s current exhibition at Taigh Chearsabhagh

Sea Silks / Sioda Na Mara by Alison Bell (photo - Alison Bell)

TEXTILE ARTIST Alison F. Bell has had a rough couple of years. Living away from home and family on her beloved Isle of Arran, Alison has spent months upon months working painstakingly with swathes of silk, attempting to turn the plain cloth into something meaningful, beautiful, inspirational.

It’s a classic tale of suffering for one’s art; a time-honoured process which is always worthwhile, as long as something has been gained at the end of it. For Alison, the results have been highly satisfactory: she now has an exhibition’s worth of textiles to marvel over.

Alison explains that the work was inspired by the beauty of west coast and island shores, particularly that of Arran. “I do actually think of it as ‘my’ shoreline,” she confesses. “I almost think of myself as a guardian of it.”

It was while walking up and down this shore daily, and noticing the changes which made it come alive, that she felt inspired to begin the sea silks collection.

“Going up and down the shoreline, we see changes day after day; they can be minute, or they can be enormous,” said Alison. “It’s fascinating, knowing that this power is there, is happening all the time.

“These surfaces that we walk over every day, we don’t even think about them – but when we turn something over and look underneath it, there’s a whole world of beauty. I want us to think more about the things we see every day, the fragility of it all – and to realise that if we don’t look after it, it will disappear.

“I basically took a two-year sabbatical from my life,” she said. “I was finding it very difficult to move the work forward, but I knew it had a lot further to go. It was as if I had become saturated with the beauty – I couldn’t see how to put it all into the work. So, I went to stay in places through Ayrshire, to open up my head a bit; and it worked.”

Alison deliberately chose places with no sea views, with no scenes of breathtaking beauty for her to look at; places with what one might call a very different kind of landscape. And somehow, taking a break from the distractions of sea and shore allowed her to finally spend hours upon hours manipulating small and large swathes of simple silk into something else.

“I almost became like a hermit in a very urban environment, and that cleared my head” she reveals. “I wouldn’t want to do it again, simply because it was really, really hard. Sensitivity-wise, and visually as well.”

The method used to make Alison’s representations of the sea from her raw cloth was a major artistic departure for Alison.

“I used all of the tacit knowledge that I have in textile skills,” she says. “Digital printing, painting, dyeing, waxing, framing.

“I’m fundamentally a two-dimensional artist, so I had to learn to visualise by actually making – to draw out the images and the feelings I had in my mind. It was quite literally a new dimension for me.”

Each piece of silk was first painted with pigment: unlike dye, the pigment stays on the surface of the silk – coating and colouring it at the same time, and giving it a stiffer, more solid feel. It’s then waxed, etched, painted again; and then each piece is finally stitched.

“The most important element of this is time – and patience,” Alison reveals. “I do one part of it, then I go away and let it sit. Then I’ll come back to it, and discover what I want to do next – each piece will take days to make.”

She adds that bringing the work to Taigh Chearsabhagh was the perfect culmination of long months of effort.

“There’s something about North Uist,” she confides. “I went there for the first time five years ago, and I was deeply affected by the place. I felt very very much at home there.

“I have exhibited at An Tobar on Mull, but that has a different feel; and of course I’m at home on Arran, but that has a different feel too. Every island does. When I came back, I found my work was somehow beginning to shift – so I just went with it.”

This affinity with the island was strong enough for it to power its way into Alison’s work; but still, she wasn’t prepared for how right her work would look there. But after going back to supervise the installation of the Sea Silks in Gallery One, she found herself exhausted by it all.

“I hadn’t realised how powerful it would be, how the installation would look in 3D,” she said. “I was gobsmacked at what I had created, in terms of presence and power. I can’t go back to who I was now. That person doesn’t exist anymore.”

After the exhibition’s run at Taigh Chearsabhagh ends, Alison has no home for the installation as yet. She is completely opposed to the idea of selling it off piece by piece – it is, she says, one work of art. She would rather release a few of the pieces into the sea, to spend their lives floating along with the seaweed.

“I’m finding it very difficult to let that work go,” she confesses. “It had such a dramatic effect on me – I feel so torn. It’s like a bereavement, in a way; you are mourning the loss of something, but at the same time, you’re celebrating the fact that it existed.

“What I would really like is to see the work somewhere that people go who need peace,” said Alison. “A hospice, or a hospital chapel, or a place of worship. An intimate space where people go to reflect and where they need quiet and stillness.
“If you could sit beneath it, and it would slowly rotate above you, and you could be just filled with peace.”

Sea Silks / Sìoda Na Mara runs at Taigh Chearsabhagh in Lochmaddy until 28 March.

© Eileen Bell, 2009

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