2007 In Stitches with Clare Bryan

In September Clare Bryan had us “In Stitches” with her life in machine embroidery. Clare came from a family of ‘makers’ but began as a hopeless sewer, preferring paint and pencils as her medium for art. However, following an absent minded calamity during her college years, when she left all her art materials on the train – lost forever she needed urgently to find a replacement medium with which to complete her graphic design homework that weekend. She found it in her mother’s ‘stash’ and has never looked back. With her drawing skills combined with textile, 3D, texture and colour Clare moved on from Manchester Polytechnic to Loughborough; transforming her work with bold colour and pattern raising the surface with collage, bonding fabrics to create backgrounds for machining and stylising her subjects to cartoon-like characters she developed her own unique style.

  

Clare is a member of The 62 Group; her influences are varied. A Flemish 15^th Century artist Robert Campin’s Madonna with the Child (detail)

is a good example of her interest in pictures that take you through the picture and out (of the window) in to the landscape beyond. Perspective draws you in to the pictures.

 full of symbolism, shows the audience viewing the marriage scene through the mirror at the back of the painting

a scene Clare later uses in her own work , borrowing the structures of the paintings to create her own versions, but bought up to date!

Again borrowing from real life, Clare collects pattern from China designs of the 40’s and 50’s to provide inspiration for floor coverings in her pictures and other detail.

Clare gradually developed from simple calico and line stitch to more heavily stitched backgrounds; reflecting grief and suspended reality in her life for a period, her colour palette changed from bold and bright to greys, greens and sludge colours with surreal designs. Clare moved on and moved to Lincolnshire to the Pea Room to help set up the studios and gallery there; her life was completely different, being a city girl landing in the flat countryside her pictures began to record her new life with scenes of the journeys the landscape, the aircraft overhead and the plane spotters below.

Clare’s techniques grew, using tufting in her work to create carpets and other detail, PVA’d tissue paper to create roads, zig-zagged over; plant dyes began to play a part too.

Clare then moved on to Glasgow to work on  community project as part of the Keeping Glasgow in stitches (http://www.malcolmlochhead.com/kgs.htm for  further info)

–        her project “Map of the World”.

Clare continues to document everyday life, but has moved back to her bold colour palettes, giving her characters bright pink or blue hair for example, and following a pitch to a card company has found her niche in anonymous “everywoman” witty and humorous nudes.

 

Similarly Van Eyck’s Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife 1434,