Quilts: A Material Culture

09/05/2023 12:00 pm – 14/05/2023 6:00 pm | The Batsford Gallery

We are very excited to host this fantastic exhibition for London Craft Week 2023 at our newly opened Batsford Gallery on Hackney Road.
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A ‘state of the craft’ survey of contemporary quilt-making, building upon a resurgence of interest in quilts as functional art, five artists with distinctive practices demonstrate the pliancy of a form which stretches from contemplative colour study to organic abstraction to the avant-garde.⁠
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Featured Artists: ⁠
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Julius Arthur – House of Quinn
Sophie Gillier
Adam Herbert
Catherine-Marie Longtin
Kate Williams
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Quilts: A Material Culture will run from the 9th of May to the 14th of May during London Craft Week 2023.

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About

A quilt is multilayered, complex in both material and meaning. It is intimate and public, autobiographical and communal. It can be didactic or celebratory; rhythmic and mathematical in form or freehand, figurative, functional. Quilts connect us all by threads and scraps to memory and narrative, to traces of community and history. They are a practice, a language, a material culture that can be endlessly revived, reworked and, as here, renewed.

The artists share a deep engagement with the materiality of cloth as the springboard for expression, present in each act of cutting, placing, layering and stitching which, finally, forms a coherent whole.

Catherine-Marie Longtin draws on minimalist abstract art in a conversation between material and technique, concept and form, reference and creation.

Julius Arthur’s work blurs the boundary between art and function; objects bear meaning through their connection with the day-to-day.

Sophie Giller’s work emphasises process, labour, craft, care, domesticity, emotion and the social history of everyday materials.

Adam Herbert embraces and celebrates small mismatches of pattern which show the hand of the maker.

In Kate Williams’ large quilted panels, imagined architectural forms cast high-key shadows in desaturated, empty landscapes.

The Batsford Gallery is our new East London gallery space; bright and airy and located between Broadway Market and Columbia Road, showcasing work by leading artists, makers and designers.

The exhibition is free to visit.

EVENT DETAILS

9 May 2023, 12:00 – 16:00
10 May 2023 – 12 May 2023, 12:00 – 19:00
13 May 2023 – 14 May 2023, 11:00 – 18:00

VENUE INFORMATION

Batsford Gallery

266 Hackney Road

E2 7SJ

Image credits:

Banner – Kate Williams Studio

Adam Herbert

Kate Williams Studio

Catherine-Marie Longtin