It’s heather time. The moors are wonderful during August and I wasn’t going to miss this year’s spectacle. I took a tiny sketchbook up one sunny day and had a couple of stops on my walk up the back of Langsett reservoir.
We were fortunate not to have any of the moor fires that have devastated further along the Peak District in this year’s heatwaves, the worst of which was caused deliberately which I find so hard to understand.
I have a few projects on the go and have been stitching away on the back of my dress and have finally got all the pins out and everything tacked on, hoorah! It will be another few months before I finish it and I’m still enjoying it as much as when I started it.
There is also a growing pile of felted pebbles on the table and the studio currently smells of wet woolly jumpers.
My arts council project got underway this month and I spent three days with artist, Gizella Warburton in a local pottery studio that I hired. This set of days was for teaching me about materials and methods as well as offering advice about some of the things I want to try. We enjoyed all the space, worked hard and may have consumed an unreasonable amount of shortbread biscuits. 😁
It’s early days but I now have a set of starter surfaces to continue working on. It’s been really interesting to consider different materials and particulars of the build process.
Having let things settle, I have a good set of notes and questions I’m asking myself about next steps, and I’m currently making some cardboard squares to act as bases to try out some surface textures and treatments.
Alongside this, I’m chewing over deeper questions about what I’m looking for, what might satisfy and what I might want to let go of. One of my main questions to myself from the outset has been how will the freer marks I want to explore coming from my love of landscape translate onto a vessel and how much of them need to remain or be visible in the end. Presently, I have absolutely no idea and I’m loving the journey to find out.
And finally, I visited Ribble Creative Stitchers’ exhibition ‘Our Precious Planet’ at Haworth Art Gallery. I have been mentoring many of the group for over a year and I was so excited to visit. They are a very talented group and the exhibition is wonderful. In fact, they have an article in the current Embroidery magazine. (I have a video of the exhibition on my Instagram and Facebook pages).
That’s all for now, I have a few days in Ireland coming up which I’m hugely looking forward to. I shall be taking time to enjoy the company of special friends and the landscape of the Loop Head peninsula. 🙂
Rachael Singleton 