Anne Reynolds
My first encounter with tapestry was close to a spiritual experience. By chance I had wandered into the Crane Gallery in central London in the spring of 1990. Showing was an exhibition of 20th Century Tapestry and my reaction to them almost brought me to my knees. My heart flipped, I felt a state of astonishment and awe. The designs were from the artists Arp, Miro, Motherwell, Davie, Delaunay, Calder, Picasso and others, and as much as I had admired their art in paint and sculptural form, in tapestry they evoked something else entirely. Through good fortune I got a place at West Dean in West Sussex on their Tapestry Weaving Diploma. It was a year of blissful delight and discovery. However, conditioned as I was to not believing in a career as an artist, and having no aptitude nor desire to teach, I returned to business. A period of unemployment in the late 90s opened a way for me to take an Art Foundation course, followed by a degree in Contemporary Art Textiles, both in Cardiff. During my degree, at the turn of the century, I became entranced with digital design for textiles which was still in its early days. It was back to computers - which is where I’d worked in the 70s and 80s, but this was fun and exciting in an entirely new way. After spending some years as a freelance designer, mostly designing large scale pieces for retail visual display, as well as for rugs, textiles and wall-hangings, I returned to Dorset when my mother became terminally ill, staying on to help care for my father. After his death I started a greetings card company but fairly quickly became ill myself with CFS/ME a decade ago, leading to a number of years virtually bed-bound. This led me to the simplicity of stitching. What I hope people might get from my work is an experience of warmth and curiosity. These pieces make me smile and I hope they might do that for others. I like having to work within the limits of the grid and discovering what might arise because of that. I enjoy the slow, methodical almost hypnotic and potentially contemplative activity of building the pieces. It’s a linear process, yet it’s not. I’m inspired by an inner dialogue of abstract shape, colours and positioning which comes from a lifetime of observing and being curious about nature, buildings, people, relationships and how they all might relate and interconnect in space and time, despite apparent disconnection. Textiles absorb light rather than reflect as most other artworks do, so they feel to me like an embrace, a welcome inwards, that calms and settles my sense of being - my life experiences having led me to appreciate that invitation. You can’t truly feel that through photographs of the work, you really have to come and be in front of them directly. And if that happens I hope people might feel their own inner smile, and maybe some of that ‘hallo’ of connection that I feel.
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