Light and Line in Barnsley

Pat Hodson led a recent study visit in Barnsley and reports for us here: ‘In retrospect, this exhibition was perfect for a study visit. The gallery is compact, but modern, light and quiet. We were the only visitors, so could discuss and debate the work freely. The exhibition was small, but in featuring only two artists, it allowed us to look closely at each group of work and to see where the connections and differences between the two artists lay. Both have fine art backgrounds, and both have found something in the tactile quality of cloth that they wanted to explore – and have done so for most of their working lives. The result is a mature vision and confidence with visual language.
As in any public gallery, you can’t touch, and fabric cries out to be touched, so you often have to imagine the sense of touch from what you see, so it was a bonus when we were provided with several samples of cloth to handle, which allowed us to begin to understand how the surfaces of Anne Morell’s work was formed. Both artists use stitch as mark and line but to both the surface of the cloth is significant. They both abstract out marks, lines and patterns from the environment, but with very different results.
Anne Morrell tensions her cloth over a stretcher, then floats it within a frame. This creates a greater contrast between the puckers and creased areas, caused by her particular technique of stitching from the back and the smooth flat areas. For me this accentuates an illusion of texture, space and plane. Artists use the technique of placing small marks massed together in a drawing to suggest an illusion of texture. Anne’s stitches create a deep puckering of the surface so the illusory and the actual seem to fuse together. Likewise, her lines of stitch suggest a plane, a surface, but are ephemeral, like sunbeams, or shadows.
Polly Binns, on the other hand, lets her hangings drop freely from nails with edges unfinished. They move slightly as you pass. The surface undulates and has unexpected light and shadows – which lessens the illusory and increases the reality of the cloth in front of you. You see the stitch for its own sake. Occasionally she reinforces a crease to create a strong textural line which throws deeper shadows. Although the marks suggest things you see on sand and marsh, the canvas is so honestly hung that you are continually brought back to its material reality. Her palette is confined to a very limited narrow tonal range which suggests English light near the sea. Anne Morrell’s colours are very different and suggest a light which is more burning, shadows stronger, but it is coloured light, colours of darkness. Another interesting illusion she uses is to draw parallel lines of stitch, which pass over and sometimes through the light and shadows – lines of light become surface plane.

Both artists observe their environment in minute detail, yet neither use representation. Anne Morell likes to create a sense of being in a landscape – ‘suggesting rather than stating” about the light and shadows around her; her garden pond – making her aware of surface tension. For Polly Binns, it is the act of walking the landscape as Richard Long does, and observing the minute and continual changes in the land, sea and light and drawing – catching ‘ a half glimpse’ through drawing – however brief, rather than working from photographs. This last made us all think and became a very interesting talking point later. The ease at which we can record by taking photographs as apposed to scribbling and jotting visual notes in the discomfort of a cold winter’s day, then trying to make sense of them later.’
This exhibition is on until January, then travels to the Turnpike Gallery, Leigh in greater Manchester and finally back to the Castle Museum in Nottingham. I suggest that it would be of interest not only to those on a textile route, but for anyone who is interested in how artists develop their own particular voice and techniques in interpreting and suggesting visual phenomena.