This is Everything we Are

Linda and I are delighted to be exhibiting in a large gallery space at Festival of Quilts this summer. We've titled the collection of work This is Everything we Are. Here's a bit of blurb on what it's all about...

"The richness of our inheritance is the knowledge and creativity passed from generation to generation, mother to daughter. Our family, the places we live, the objects we live with, become the things that define us as individuals. In turn those things can be symbolic, even talismanic; motifs and metaphors for our experiences and personalities. A moth is a memory, dusty winged and fragile. A butterfly is a question as bright and flighty as the young mind that asks it. Tangled branches and thorns are at once both threat and protection. A poppy seedhead a sentinel. Swallows and small birds our most precious things, crows and rooks the keepers of secrets.

We have collected, read, looked, drawn, painted. Our work is layered with technique and process reflecting both a love of fabric and stitch, but also paper, paint and print. This is an exhibition inspired by everything that has defined us, a self portrait in the widest sense. A picture of mothers and daughters. This is everything we are."

Linda and I will be showing an almost exclusively new collection of work. I think maybe just one or two pieces may have been exhibited before. We had to supply images to the organisers of Festival of Quilts quite early on, and of course, because of how we work, we didn't have much underway that was at a photographable stage! The image that you might have seen in some of the publicity material is a detail of something that I'm working on called This is Me. Since the photo was taken I've worked hard to add lots of stitch to the prints. It is a quilt show after all, so while I sometimes think prints are fine without any quilting, for this exhibition there will be lots of stitch. If someone would just send the elves and fairies to help me out in the small hours with the amount of labour then it'll all be fine.

I hope you might enjoy following along as we document the making of the work for this exhibition. I'll be posting as frequently as I can with updates from the studio.

Thanks for reading.
Love Laura
x