4 August 2024
By Mary Bermingham
mary@TheCork.ie
“Follow the red thread to Mallow”
West End Art Studios in Mallow is to host its first art textile exhibition this month.
‘Follow the red thread’ will be officially opened at 6pm on Friday 9th August by the international renowned, Cork-based textile artist, Helen O’Shea. The exhibition will run every Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 11am-5pm from 9th to 25th August.
Artists, from left to right, Marjan Vos Áine Sealy and Theresa Connolly invite art lovers to Follow the Red Thread to the West End Art Studios in Mallow
‘The Good wife – A response’ by Theresa Connolly, close up detail
‘Ebbing tide’ by Áine Sealy naturally dyed cotton with indigo, iron and oak gall
The exhibition by a group of Cork Textiles Network members and recent Art Textile graduates from Crawford College of Art and Design follows on from their graduate show, Ariadne’s Thread, held in the MTU Gallery at 46 Grand Parade in Cork City in June.
It will showcase work by eight of the graduates and will include wall-hung and sculptural pieces including weave, crochet, stitch, felting, print and natural dyes.
The eight exhibiting artists are Theresa Connolly, Claudia Hernandez-Espinosa, Laurie Manning, Áine Sealy, Kay Roche and Marjan Vos, Patsy Atkinson and Mallow-based artist, Sarah Buckley, who is a founding member of West End Art Studios and curator of this year’s Cork Craft Month’s ‘Emerge’ exhibition.
She said: “It is a great milestone in the gallery’s history to date to host an exhibition that is entirely dedicated to contemporary textile art. As a fellow graduate of this group of exhibitors, I feel very close to this body of work and to the artists behind the work which explores a broad range of complex themes such as loss, memory, family history, nature, connection, conflict and exploitation.”
The exhibition’s title, ‘Follow the red thread’ alludes to the Greek mythology tale of Ariadne, King Minos’ daughter, who is associated with problem-solving skills, ingenuity and creativity. When Theseus went to slay the Minotaur, she helped him to escape the labyrinth by giving him a ball of red thread.
At the heart of this Greek myth lies a metaphor relating to finding one’s way through the maze of the creative process – something the eight female exhibitors can relate to well as each showed great intuition, creativity and clever problem-solving skills in creating this body of work.