Bethany Hill: Art And Inspirations

Amy Stephens’ work is fundamentally sculptural in both its form and content, taking for its starting point the tactile and expressive qualities of a range of materials. Contrasting the angularity of wood and metal with the soft tactility of fabric and flock, her assemblages occupy a space between the abstract and the associative, and between seduction and control. Sparse and inherently structural, they have a strong architectural presence and make a conscious nod to Modernist or Minimalist sculptural traditions. Rendering materials and objects found in nature through industrial processes such as bronze casting and wood planning , Stephens highlights the tension between the natural world and artificial methods of production. In this way the artist explores the symbiotic relationship between nature and human agency, and draws attention to their tenuous interrelationship through the creation of objects that are at once beautiful and threatening. Stephens’ sculptures are of

Throughout this semester I wanted to challenge myself and look at working with calico, watercolour and stitch looking at figures in photographs, I also wanted this piece to be very personal to me and be in memory of my nanna as well as be a public piece. For this project I wanted to look at how The Walker Gallery is a very family friendly gallery but not everyone can Remember seeing all the gallery which gave me the idea to look at how our minds might betray what we remember. The piece I created was called “Family selfie” and its 8” x 8” and the media used was water colour and stitch on calico, it is about the idea of remembering little bits like colour of someone’s hair or the colour of what they are wearing, this piece is also about patchy memories and tangled thoughts, so you can remember what colour hair someone has but you can’t remember their facial features or brand of clothing they had on which ties in with why this piece is in the café. People te

Artist Sheena Liam  has a one-of-a-kind, handcrafted approach to embroidery. Favouring female subjects, with a focus on flowing hairstyles, Liam creates unique portraits of women and girls with thread tresses that cascade from the canvas. Each portrait is created using black thread, culminating in a collection of works reminiscent of simple yet exquisitely rendered line drawings. While the majority of each embroidered image lays flat, the subject's hair falls loosely from her face, adding a touch of three-dimensionality to an otherwise uniform surface. Thanks to the thread's versatility, Liam is able to experiment with a range of hairstyles, from perfectly coiffed braided pigtails to loosely tied top-knots.     As a nod to the traditional craft, Liam uses an embroidery hoop to complete each inventive piece. In some cases, the figures' hair even extends beyond the frame, conveying the artist's tendency to challenge the boundaries and limitation

Singapore-based artist Izziyana Suhaimi introduces embroidered accents to her carefully rendered pencil and watercolor illustrations. Patterns of flowers unfold much like a tapestry across the paper canvas creating pieces she refers to as “evidence of the hand and of time.” For her series The Looms in Our Bones Suhaimi focuses mostly on fashion acessories where scarves, hats, and other clothing is depicted in thread, while she also uses the same techniques for more abstract shapes and designs . From her artist statement: " Embroidery for me is a quiet and still act, where each stitch represents a moment passed. The building of stitches then becomes a re presentation of time passing and the final work is like a physical manifestation of time – a time object. Each stitch is also a recording of the maker’s thoughts and emotions. I enjoy the duality of embroidery, in its movements of stabbing, cutting, covering, building, repairing, taking apart. Every stitch made see

Ana Teresa Barboza´s characteristic use of crafts such as patchwork, knitting or embroidery combined with other media on her artistic work, bestow a poetic quality to depictions of plants and their growth – which defy our serial and industrialized times. Since she graduated from the Art Faculty of the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú , Barboza´s use of manual crafts became the means to convey a meditative and powerful observation with the environment and her relationship with reality. Her laborious use of traditionally feminine handicraft has become her trademark, where her interest was centered initially on depictions of herself and the relationship with her body and in Animales Familiares  on the liaison of herself and her relation with others by the use of animal metaphors. Through photographs the artist recently has registered spaces she inhabited for long periods of time. With this technique, her experiences were depicted in an image; printed on paper as footprints on

Lauren Velvick is a writer, Artist and curator based in Manchester. She is currently CO director of the exhibition centre for the “life and use of books” and programme co-ordinator at Bluecoat Arts Centre in Liverpool. She is also a contributor to the national and local arts publications , for example : Arts Monthly, The Skinny, The Double Negative and This is tomorrow, and is also a contributing editor of corridor 8 She is inspired by Encountering every day creativity and intensely boring/meditative city walks, all sorts of things I like how she uses text , writing and speaking as a performance piece instead of just painting a picture but I don’t think I could do this in my practice because im not really a performing artist. I also like how her work is sometimes based on her response to other artist http://www.lifeanduseofbooks.org/old_site/corridor-videos.html I was unable to add some videos of Laurens work but here is a link to some