Folk Tales with Anne Kelly

Anne Kelly's talk last Friday took us on a fascinating tour through a number of her recent projects, commissions and exhibitions, illustrated with a wealth of images and samples to drool over.  Anne described how she is inspired mainly by botanical, narrative and geographical themes, which she combines with 'found' textiles in her unique folk-art style.  

Anne Kelly

Particularly intriguing among her many samples, were the paper maps laminated and stitched onto paper or fabric, which creates an unusual and very tactile material.

Anne Kelly

On Saturday’s 'Folk Tales' workshop Anne stressed that she wanted people to use pieces of fabric they already had, ideally things that had relevance for the stitcher, and which could create a meaningful piece of work. The aim was not to buy any materials for the workshop, but to incorporate textile fragments that would have some emotional resonance. Anne also stressed the importance of keeping things simple and uncomplicated.

As preparation, we spent a couple of hours with carved wooden stamps - printing some basic shapes to use on our pieces – and cutting a simple stencil, e.g. a bird or flower outline. Symbols from nature are, of course, central to folk art, especially birds, flowers, trees and hearts.  

Inevitably, the selection of a suitable background fabric and placement of images led to much deliberation and digging into piles in baskets, bags and boxes.  Fortunately, Anne has a very good eye for what is going to work well, and was extremely helpful – guiding each individual in appropriate choices and placement.

We started on some stitching after lunch, using thread colours that would enhance and emphasize the shapes we had put down – somewhat against most people’s natural tendency to want to blend and integrate. 

Thanks to Anne’s careful time management and decisiveness in not letting us over-complicate our designs, we enjoyed a relaxed and very satisfying workshop. Naturally, most of the stitching will be done at home, but we finished the day with a clear idea of what we were going to do and the feeling that it had been a day well spent.

Members' work created on the day: