logo
Hawick film festival celebrates region's textile history

Hawick film festival celebrates region's textile history

BBC News01-05-2025

A film festival in the Borders is celebrating the region's textile history this year.The Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival is in its 15th edition and runs in Hawick from 1 to 4 May.It includes a film looking at the legacy of textile designers Bernat and Margaret Klein who lived near Selkirk.Festival director Michael Pattinson said they were excited to host its premiere in the Borders.
The film, called On Weaving, is the work of 2012 Turner Prize nominee, Luke Fowler and 2014 Max Mara prize winner, Corin Sworn.It features the current owners of the Kleins former home, talking about them and the story of the textile industry in the Borders.Mr Pattinson said he was delighted to have the film as part of this year's festival."The film is a rich portrait of the Klein home as well as of active sites of textiles production in the Scottish Borders," he said."Its use of analogue film to capture these places in all their colour and texture provides a lasting snapshot of our region's architectural and industrial heritage."

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Goodwood Art Foundation: Rachel Whiteread proves simplicity is best
Goodwood Art Foundation: Rachel Whiteread proves simplicity is best

Telegraph

time6 days ago

  • Telegraph

Goodwood Art Foundation: Rachel Whiteread proves simplicity is best

Few things at Goodwood are muted. On this 12,000-acre estate, crowned by that sprawling country house, the Duke of Richmond and Gordon hosts shooting parties, a high-speed hillclimb and a classic-car festival. But seek out, in a corner of his domain, the new Art Foundation, which opens this weekend, and you'll be met by serenity. Glad of it, as well: the selection of contemporary art on display – 14 works, or groups thereof – thrives in these 70 acres of ancient trees and winding paths. The Foundation has two small galleries; a third is in the works. In the larger space is the inaugural headline act: Rachel Whiteread, represented indoors by two sculptural installations and, rare thing, a selection of photographs. Few British artists make work as consistently high-calibre. Whiteread's ability to give form and shape to the traces we leave behind, the absences that build our worlds, hasn't palled since she won the Turner Prize with House in 1993. In the Gallery, she presents Doppelgänger (2020-1), a shed assembled from found materials then painted a uniform white; and Bergamo III (2023), materialisations of the space beneath chairs and stools, cut from north-Italian stone. These pieces hint at struggle and loss – the latter in particular, given Bergamo's experience in the Covid-19 pandemic – but their meaning remains, in Whiteread's familiar way, so beautifully elusive: not quite romantic, not quite sad. Occasionally, she verges on funny. Of all the works at Goodwood, the Instagram star will be one of her outdoor offerings, Down and Up (2024-5), a pair of staircases heading to nowhere, placed at a meadow's edge. The leading role may be Whiteread's, but look for two gems by Veronica Ryan: a pair of bronzes, which give us magnolias in one case as a pod, and in the other as heads in bloom. The subtlety of the metalwork, the fineness of the hues: Ryan's craftsmanship stops you dead. Most of the pieces you encounter here are of comparable quality. That said, small exhibitions expose any weaknesses, and Goodwood has a few. Rose Wylie's pineapple-like sculptures try to be bobbled and daffy while also retaining an edge – exotic fruit means colonial imports; one looks a bit like a bomb – but they don't get the balance right. Isamu Noguchi's geometric stack isn't one of his more interesting works. Still, as at Yorkshire Sculpture Park or Hauser & Wirth's Somerset branch, it's a pleasure not to be jammed in a heaving urban gallery: to wander down woodchip walks and quiet glades, and see art in the open air. Best of all, you don't need a smartphone: just pick up a handsome printed map, less a leaflet than a brochure. (Or even do without one, although the sign by each work omits to name its materials, which most people like to know.) You could call some of these pieces, undemonstrative forms in a natural setting, straightforward – even 'simple', as the Foundation calls its grounds. If so, fine: simplicity can be rich. Whiteread's art is proof of that.

Rachel Whiteread review – leafy woods, glorious views and beautiful, brutal blights
Rachel Whiteread review – leafy woods, glorious views and beautiful, brutal blights

The Guardian

time6 days ago

  • The Guardian

Rachel Whiteread review – leafy woods, glorious views and beautiful, brutal blights

I feel like I've stumbled into a 1970s album cover for the Who or Led Zeppelin that juxtaposes nature and post-industrial malaise. Emerging from woodlands on the Goodwood Estate in West Sussex, you see a massive concrete cast of a staircase in a lush green field – a spectacular, surreal collision of urban grit and English pastoral. This is Rachel Whiteread's Down and Up, a brutal intruder in the landscape. Leafy woods and glorious views – I contemplated Down and Up through a veil of rain but was assured you can see down to the sea on a sunny day – create a dramatic setting for her stark sepulchres. In a forest clearing stands another work, Untitled (Pair) – two bone-white rectangular slabs that look like death. That's no accident, for their shallow concave tops were cast from mortuary tables. Alone with this monument, the tall trees standing guard around me, I don't so much ponder mortality as silently scream. House, the famous, lost masterpiece that won Whiteread the 1993 Turner prize, also once stood in the open air, as ungainly and insistent against an east London sky as these remorseless objects look in a much more tranquil context. It was demolished in a culture war that's forgotten now, but Whiteread is no sensationalist. Her art hits you for a moment with harsh modernism, but then – unless you refuse to look and feel, as the local council did – its sombre poetry creeps up on you. Down and Up is cast from an old staircase in a synagogue in Bethnal Green, east London. You can see why these stairs fascinate her: they are curiously narrow and sloped, as if pushed out of shape by multitudes of long-gone feet. Odd, baffling details like this give her art warmth and passion, while the blank masses of cast material, in this case grey concrete, fill it with silence and terror. You can't care about life, her art suggests, without recognising death. She sees ghosts everywhere. Her exhibition launches the Goodwood Art Foundation. In its low-slung, partly glass-walled gallery, Whiteread's eye for decay and loss infects a new series of brightly coloured but emotionally serious photographs. Wherever she goes, in Essex or Italy, Whiteread in these pictures sees the crack in the teacup, the rusty stain on the mosaic floor. She notices bin bags like shrouds, a rotting community centre that refuses to be picturesque. Sometimes their foreboding is a bit false, even descending into bathos. We can all be spooked by crows gathering on a telephone wire and sometimes an abandoned child's toy is just that, however wretched it looks on the doorstep. Yet this is how Whiteread's imagination works: she sees a continuum between everyday melancholia and collective grief. In 2023, she had a show in Bergamo, Italy – which was severely hit by Covid – creating tombstone-like sculptures to mourn the lost. Some are here. Based on casts of the spaces under chairs – a favourite Whiteread motif – they are marked by recesses where legs and struts once were. She aspires to public monuments yet also flees into secret recesses of introspection and memory – which is why a pastoral landscape is such a resonant setting for her art. Two photographs in the gallery show rotting, abandoned places, a shed and a caravan, in each of which someone seems to have lived a hermitic existence, but these shelters rust and rot away, surrendering to weeds. In front of them she recreates this spectacle of solitude and dissolution in her sculpture Doppelgänger, a reconstruction of a smashed, forgotten shack, its broken walls pierced by fallen branches, painted in white emulsion, a ghostly covering that with brilliant simplicity makes reality metamorphosise into art. Outside in the woods, at the end of a long, narrow vista, she has placed a concrete cast of a sealed shed, its windows opaque, its door closed for ever. You feel more and more alone walking around it, trying to find the way in. It is called Detached II. This is a poem to solitude and here in the garden, surrounded by unruly spring growth, it feels as eccentric and lost as the rotting caravan and shack in her photographs. Dissolution and decay are part of nature. They are also part of our lives and time's arrow only points one way. Thoughts like these are not consoling but they feel as if they belong in the woods, like intoxicating mushrooms of melancholy. Whiteread is a great modern artist and her sculptures blight this pastoral, beautifully. Rachel Whiteread's exhibition is at Goodwood Art Foundation from 31 May to 2 November

Turner Prize judge 'coming home to Scotland' to head up international art festival
Turner Prize judge 'coming home to Scotland' to head up international art festival

Scotsman

time28-05-2025

  • Scotsman

Turner Prize judge 'coming home to Scotland' to head up international art festival

Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... A Shetland-born judge of the prestigious Turner Prize is to head up a major Scottish art festival. Helen Nisbet has been announced as the new director of Glasgow International - Scotland's biennial festival of contemporary art. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Ms Nisbet, who judged the Turner Prize in 2023, will take up the role this summer, ahead of the 11th edition of the festival, which starts on in June next year. Previous director Richard Birkett stepped down in February. Both Ms Nisbet and Mr Birkett are to sit on the panel for the 2026 open call for artists, which closed on May 26. Glasgow International Director Helen Nisbet. Photo: Christa Holka | Glasgow International Ms Nisbet has held key curatorial and leadership positions, including artistic director for Art Night, chief executive and artistic director for Cromwell Place and Curator at Cubitt, as well as holding a role as non-executive director for the Shetland-based artist-led project GAADA. She said: "I'm so happy to be coming home to Scotland as director of Glasgow International. I'm excited to work with, and learn from, the festival team and to be amongst the gorgeous light, energy, artists, communities [and even the rain] in Glasgow again.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Ms Nisbet added: 'Glasgow International is a critical biennial, which represents a diversity of contemporary and cultural practice, and it is a privilege to lead it into its next phase. I bring with me a commitment shaped by years of collaboration with artists, organisers, communities, partners and audiences - locally, nationally, and internationally.' Ms Nisbet's appointment coincides with other key appointments within the festival team, including Pelumi Odubanjo as curator and Martel Ollerenshaw as festival manager. Every two years Glasgow International presents an array of artists' projects across Glasgow by international artists and those based locally. These projects are selected through an open call by an invited panel of international and local artists, curators and producers and the Glasgow International Programme team. Emma Nicolson, Creative Scotland's head of visual arts, said: 'We'd like to congratulate Helen Nisbet on her appointment and look forward to welcoming her back to Scotland. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'Glasgow International contributes significantly to the cultural offer of the city and is recognised locally and globally for its vibrant and distinctive programme. Helen brings a wealth of experience to the festival, and we are excited to see how her curatorial vision and commitment to artists and audiences will influence and shape its future direction.'

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into the world of global news and events? Download our app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store