Work by Caroline Dear

Two exhibitions; entwined/suainte by Caroline Dear and More than Floral open this weekend at Inverness Museum and Art Gallery.

CAROLINE DEAR – entwined

Opening in the Small Gallery at Inverness Museum & Art Gallery on Saturday 9th July 2011 is the third of a series of four Craft Spotlight exhibitions which are part of Making Progress, HI-Arts Craft mentoring and business support scheme for mid career makers.

This exhibition by Caroline Dear includes 100 ropes made from 50 different plants from the island of Skye. Traditionally, handmade ropes were used for practical purposes such as thatching roofs but Caroline takes the tradition to new realms of creativity.

Some of the chosen materials are those that were traditionally used for making ropes by hand. Other plants, such as dandelion stems and fern fronds, were chosen to experiment with. The ropes were made nearly every day between 1st February and the 21st June 2011, with their progress logged on a blog http://carolinedear.blogspot.com/. The criteria for choosing specific plants were they it needed to be abundant, the stems could be made into rope without drying or soaking and they needed no preparation.

Caroline Dear says of her work, ‘The specific way in which fragile single plant stems can be entwined to make strong rope can be seen as a metaphor for the universal aspects of our lives. The narrative of our individual lives is a series of linked entwinings, with each other, with the land around us, with past knowledge and with place. These are ordinary plants, of seemingly little significance, yet they form an intricate and indispensable part of the ecology of a particular place. At present, throughout the world, one in five plants are threatened with extinction. These ropes are a fresh thread to link us anew with specific plants and a particular landscape. Our lives are a network of threads, binding, tying and connecting our many individual paths. These ropes are not to fasten the thatch, tether the cow or snare the bird, their function is to connect, link and entwine us to the living world around us.’

Pamela Conacher, HI-Arts Craft Development Coordinator said: “Our 2011 Making Progress makers are now reaching the culmination of their mentoring programme. The Spotlight exhibitions are a wonderful way of focusing their talents and give them invaluable experience in the process of curating an exhibition. I very much look forward to seeing the results of all their dedication and to viewing work that has pushed their skills to a new level”. Funding for the Making Progress programme is through HIE, Creative Scotland, Rural Innovation Fund.

The exhibition runs at Inverness Museum & Art Gallery until 6th August 2011.

More than Floral

Also opening this weekend at Inverness Museum & Art Gallery is an exhibition entitled ‘More Than Floral’.

A mixed media exhibition exploring themes of nature through a broad range of objects, More Than Floral looks closely at the inspiration the natural world provides for many makers, artists and photographers.

Curated by Alison Milner, the exhibition is touring across the UK. and includes a variety of techniques and materials. All the works invite the viewer to look closely at the extraordinary world of plants and our relationship to them, from luminous photographic prints of seaweed by Steve Speller and Alison Milner to Ruth Moilliet’s ghostly flowers sandwiched between layers of glass.

The smallest to the largest species of flora are featured with Sin Mui Ching-Martin’s intricately detailed pencil drawings of moss and Teresa Stewart Goodman’s quirky and very personal embroideries of trees.

The exhibition opens at Inverness Museum & Art Gallery on 9th July and runs until 6th August 2011 when it moves to the St Fergus Gallery, Wick Library and the Swanson Gallery, Thurso Library from 3rd September – 1st October 2011.

Links:

• Inverness Museum and Art Gallery

• HI-Arts Craft Development

For further information please contact:

Pamela Conacher at HI-Arts on pamela@hi-arts.co.uk , tel: (0)1463 720886 or Cathy Shankland, Exhibitions Officer, Highland Council on Cathy.Shankland@highland.gov.uk,  tel. +44 (0)1463 237114