Jerwood Applied Arts Prize 2002 Textiles
Ettrick Riverside, Selkirk until October 31

After this week’s award ceremony for the Jerwood Applied Arts Prize 2003, it might seem odd to focus on last year’s prize. This, however, is the first time the touring exhibition has ever made it to Scotland, the textiles show finding a natural home in Selkirk’s Ettrick Riverside, a former Victorian textiles mill.

The £15,000 award has been described as the applied arts equivalent of the Turner Prize, running on a five-year cycle of ceramics, textiles, glass, furniture and jewellery. Although all eight short-listed artists were female, their work is absolutely not the stuff of Women’s Guild meetings. Spanning a range of traditional techniques such as tapestry, knitting and appliqué, and some not so traditional ones such as video and optical technologies, the works on show deal with issues of deformity, denial and disaster as well as playing with the possibilities and conventions of textile design.

Fragmented Bell is one of a series of over-printed children’s dresses reclaimed from The Children’s Home of Cincinnati, and exhibited by the winner, Shelly Goldsmith. The tiny dress is decorated with what looks like a video still of suburban wreckage in the wake of an earthquake or a tornado – a shocking image made all the more horrific by its implied connection with this empty little dress.

Textile work is popularly viewed as a female pastime, soft, cuddly, and safe. While these preconceptions are being challenged worldwide (guerilla knitters are increasing in number) they are exploited shrewdly by the Jerwood artists. Freddie Robins uses knitting to create human clothes and skins which live somewhere between humour and horror, their innocent appearance drawing us into her narratives. Six pairs of gloves stand in a row, all misshapen, or burnt, or threaded through with flowing red wool like the stigmata. Each pair bears a person’s name, suggesting real people who are deformed or have suffered nasty accidents. Or, we would prefer to believe, these are simply humorous illustrations of over-ambitious knitting efforts which have gone wrong.

Skin – A Good Thing To Live In, also by Robins, is a finely knitted pink wool human skin, as if ready to walk into, fold over, and stitch up at the back. This playful costume looks functional and it is quite tempting to try it on, but laid out on the floor it is strongly reminiscent of a sheep-skin or tiger-skin rug. So, like all Robins’ works, this human skin is at once charming and repulsive.

As with most crafts, the time and effort put into textile works really shows. Every product is special if only because it was made in a very deliberate, meticulous way. Rowena Dring uses this psychology in her large fabric appliqués, which look from a distance like a cross between pop art, advertising and painting by numbers. The images – taken from snapshots – are of a red sportscar on a weedy old B-road and an icecream van on the beach, two mundane views which are drearily similar to mundane views everywhere.

The stark, flat, local colour is outlined everywhere by a uniform black line, creating a graphic style which looks nothing like textile work. Only close up is it obvious that the lines are stitched and the colours are made of individual patches of material, leaving the viewer wondering why on earth such undistinguished views have been privileged with such painstaking handiwork. The sad fact is that these views are a summer-time haven for many of us, our only escape from lives even less beautiful.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 14.09.03