Dialogue

I was met by Caron Penny who is the head of the studio and had a fascinating introduction to the work of the studio and the possibilities for how a collaborative venture might happen. I was also introduced to The Director of the studio Pat Taylor and Philip Sanderson. We all agreed that a continuous dialogue would be the best way to develop an innovative project. So this blog hopefully is the start of this dialogue. The Tapestry on view is a current commission for Historic Scotland.

Inside the Studio

This is a view inside the Tapestry Studio. My collages are in the front. The studio itself is fantastic, light airy and calm.

West Dean Tapestry Studio

On Monday I took some of my drawings to The West Dean Tapestry Studio to discuss the possibility of a collaborative project which would hopefully result in the production of a Tapestry. It was a really stimulating meeting with great ideas and the team responded in a really positive way.

More Ideas

Barbara Howey 2009

continued...

Another collage using the same process.

Collage

This image is of Seletar Airbase. It looks as if it was taken during the second world war. I have collaged the image with Ikat which is a traditional Malay textile which I downloaded from the web.

Jalan Kayu

I contacted the team at jalankayutrail.blogspot.com and asked if I could use some of the images on the blog and have since then started a dialogue with them. What fascinated me about the images was when printed out the images started to break up into digital patterns which seemed to me reminiscent of the tapestry "beads" that I had recently seen at the Aubusson Tapestry museum in France. These "beads" are reminiscent of digital pixels and I thought perhaps I could make connections between these two processes in terms of some art work. I started to collage the images with Ikat. That is traditional Malay Textiles

Tapestry Project

It is a while since I have used my blog but a new project is starting and I hope to collaborate with West Dean Tapestry Studio and the team on the Jalan Kayu Trail Blog in Singapore and so I would like to initiate an open dialogue for the development of ideas.

To introduce my work. I am a painter who works with ideas of personal and cultural memory. My previous work is documented below. I wanted to think about aspects of my childhood in Singapore. I remeber the vibrancy of Singapore as a six year old child when visiting markets/botanic gardens/architecture and the diversity and richness of the people. This was in stark contrast to the "Little England" of Seletar Camp. I wanted to think about the cultural separation at the butt end of the colonial presence in Singapore and and how I could address this in a series of work.

How would I do this? It was over 40 years ago since I was there. I started to look through postings on the web and found a brilliant little blog on the History of Jalan Kayu and Seletar Camp.