Stiched Stories 17th September - 14th December 2007

Stories - remembered, personal, mythical or imaginary - are the underlying inspiration for the textile artists in this exhibition. Their ideas are communicated in the medium of thread and fabric, materials that often have a powerful emotional symbolism in the lives of human beings. The work is about journeys through life – adventures, happenings and moments that can be huge or small, life-changing or life–enriching. This exhibition explores the universal themes of love and loss, life and death, pleasure and sadness. Each artist brings a particular sensitivity to their experience of being alive, communicating personal experiences and personal perceptions of the world.

Aim Higher 2007 Cansfield School

Reliquiae - Stephen Livingstone

Stephen Livingstone creates works that evoke a sense of the distant past, particularly the history associated with his local landscape of Northumberland and County Durham.
Inspired by the the Lindisfarne Gospels and the life of St Cuthbert, he also makes reference to the natural world drawing on the symbolic sense of transcience that moths, moons and migrating birds evoke. He has a profound sensitivity to the connection between nature and human experience deriving layers of meaning from geometric patterning, ancient maps and stories. His creative journey takes him to the heart of the Human Spirit and celebrates human endeavor. It recognises the desire to create objects of beauty, to create symmetries that organise and symbolise knowledge and experience.

Reliquiae - Gillian Robinson - All That Remains

Gillian Robinson’s installation, ‘All That Remains’, is a series of over fifty books, inspired by the texture and surface qualities of ancient icons found in Monasteries in Cyprus. They carry an atmosphere of survival of endurance and hope.

Some of the books have sculptural qualities, some are bound and tied with their contents locked away, whilst others can be handled and explored. They have a beautiful physicality - they smell of ash, wax or resin. Pages ask to be turned, and their surfaces cracked open, revealing juxtapositions, glimpsed fragments. Somehow the form of the books is at one with the content. Books have a powerful symbolism, communicating ideas, knowledge, wisdom, history, experience. ‘All That Remains’ seems to capture that sense of power, combined with great vulnerability.

Reliquiae - Exhibition Preview 27th April 2007

Stephen Livingstone and Gillian Robinson at the preview evening.

Reliquiae

Gillian Robinson and Stephen Livingstone both create beautiful, sculptural artworks inspired by the form of books. Their work feels ancient, treasured, preserved - like relics from another time.

April - July 2007

St Peters