Composition- Big, Bold & Brave with Ruth Issett

Composition- Big, Bold & Brave with Ruth Issett

Summer School 2022

Starting from simple black and white cut paper compositions, students worked through many possibilities. They then selected two contrasting paper colours and developed their ideas further, exploring a number of different challenges. They were asked to work quickly and to enlarge their ideas so that their work climbed the wall or covered their workspace. By sharing and being open minded students quickly produced a wide variety of possibilities that could then be adapted to simple bold textile pieces.

Using large pieces of pre coloured fabric supplied by the tutor, everyone developed their paper ideas further using layers of fabric, applique, cutting and manipulations as well as additional stitch. Despite the extreme heat the group worked happily together sharing and encouraging each other to develop new ways of working and becoming braver and bolder and sometimes bigger!

Ruth Issett

The residential Summer Schools are tutored by different Textile Study Group members each year, and are open to everyone. This year the Textile Study Group Summer School was led by Ruth IssettJan Miller and Mary Sleigh. The tutors worked with design, composition and ideas as fundamental parts of their courses, encouraging and supporting the students during their inspirational courses. Below are examples of students work.

Summer School 2023

Summer School 2023

Title – Salvage: Transform

The focus of the Summer School will be on salvaging and repurposing a wide range of materials. You may choose to work with a personal collection, finding inspiration in found objects, you could find new life in old materials or you might be drawn to work with discarded materials and the principles of fan making to explore ideas.

Your enthusiastic and experienced tutors will encourage and support you in finding new stories to tell through your work. Dates – Monday 17 – Thursday 20 July 2023.  ( 4 days) Tutors – Lois Blackburn, Julia Triston and Shelley Rhodes

Further course information and Booking Opens – 27th September

TSG Summer School 2022 

TSG Summer School 2022 

Making a Point

The residential Summer Schools are tutored by different Textile Study Group members each year, and are open to everyone. This year the Textile Study Group Summer School was led by Ruth Issett, Jan Miller and Mary Sleigh. The tutors worked with design, composition and ideas as fundamental parts of their courses, encouraging and supporting the students during their inspirational courses. Below Mary talks about her workshops and shares some photos of her students work:

Coming into view: Remove I Reduce I  Refine

We started with items kept and treasured by each student and started to try different ways of experimenting with a variety of techniques, exploring through mixed media possible ways of paring back, obscuring, hiding, revealing and seeing something familiar with new eyes. By allowing for change through these activities, different ways of working emerged and all the students came up with exciting and some unexpected results.

Everybody rose to the challenges including the weather! Despite fire, flood and pestilence all the students came up smiling with some very individual work. It was a happy and productive few days with a hardworking and enthusiastic group of students with lots more to develop.

Mary K Sleigh

Composition: big | bold | brave, with Bobby Britnell

Composition: big | bold | brave, with Bobby Britnell

We are delighted to share that three space have become available to join in with Bobby Britnell’s Summer School 2022, Composition: big, bold, brave.

Composition is one of the key elements in art and design, whether you are creating a drawing, painting or involved with any visual art form. It provides the viewer with the tools needed for making sense of finished works.

We will begin by looking at how a composition can be changed by the simple placing of a horizontal line, the size of motifs in relation to the picture plane, and the positioning of these motifs. We will investigate some of these ideas through a number of creative exercises onto paper and from these create some large bold monochromatic drawings.

Learning from master artists is paramount in understanding these concepts, so artist research will be fundamental in cementing personal ideas. Be prepared for some dramatic effects and large scale works on fabric which explore these concepts in challenging ways.

Bobby runs and teaches courses from her studio in South Shropshire and attracts students from all over the world. She also brings in the best UK tutors. She exhibits and teaches all over the country and abroad and was a tutor on the BA (Hons) programme for the Julia Caprara School of Stitched Textiles. She published her first book in 2013, which has been reprinted in 2021.

The summer school begins at 2.00pm on Monday 18 July, and ends after afternoon tea on Thursday 21 July 2022.