Southport Contemporary Arts
‘Bloom: a celebration of flowers in vases’
Solo exhibition by Carole Dawber
ArtHouse, 65 Eastbank Street, Southport, Merseyside, PR8 1EJ
1st – 12th November 2022
If pictures had a scent, then Carole Dawber’s embroideries and paintings would certainly fill the air with their tempting fragrances.
In art flowers have always stood the test of time as the ultimate source of natural beauty and elegance. Whether carved into clay or taking centre stage in a still life, from ancient times to the present-day, they have always been the favourite muse of artists.
Building on this intoxicating heritage, Carole’s own floral arrangements on display at the ArtHouse play with their inherent colour and form whether painted via wet media or sympathetically stitched and appliqued.
A graduate of the celebrated Liverpool Art School (now Liverpool John Moores University) from the 1970s, Carole who now lives in Birkdale, describes her time at Liverpool as ‘magical’.
“All I did all day was draw and paint, work with fabric, design clothes, and create by taking risks and having fun. The most inspiring artists, tutors and musicians surrounded me. It was awesome. There were no limits to imagination. I meet such amazing people, all of whom just loved creativity for the idea of invention.”
During the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977, Carole’s research into fabric dying from natural sources, while still a student in Liverpool, earned her the accolade of being awarded a lifetime Fellowship of the Royal Society of Arts.
“The celebration of colour still remains the inherent heartbeat throughout all my work”.
When assembling her latest still life groupings, Carole often incorporates her own hand thrown ceramics and uses flowers from her garden.
“My starting point is through collage and drawing in sketchbooks before moving onto paint. I work mainly in acrylic as I love the vibrancy of the colour overlay of light over dark and the possibility of unexpected hues of when using transparent glazes. The sketchbooks and the subsequent paintings form the visual starting points for the colour development and stitch expressions in the silk”.
For the current exhibition she has also “revisited fabric appliqué technics to express the exuberance of the cut blooms. Each flower is created using hand dyed, reclaimed sari silk, hand cut into individual petal and leaf forms, bonded together using transfer adhesive. These are then assembled into individual floral stems that are used in a similar way to any cut bloom arrangement. Once the whole composition is complete hand stitching is used to enhance and anchor both silk blooms and silk backgrounds.”
Certainly not one to be missed, this latest showing by Carole Dawber will be on display at the ArtHouse, Eastbank Street, Southport from 1st – 12th November 2022. The gallery is open Tuesday – Friday 10am-3pm. Saturday 11am-4pm.
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