William Morris Gallery

Tapestries have always told stories. In this exhibition 15 women artists from the UK, USA, Canada, New Zealand and Japan weave the stories of our time: the possibilities, the hopes and lost chances. Using the traditional hand woven tapestry techniques that connect us to the past, they have taken contemporary images and events, personal dreams and feelings. The tapestries range in subject matter, from intimate mother and child relationships and reflections of rural mythologies, to floods and urban decay. Always at the heart of the work is the human condition, the artists offering us both a utopian and dystopian view - the choice is ours.

Curated by Lesley Millar, Professor of Textile Culture and Director of the International Textile Research Centre at the University for the Creative Arts in collaboration with National Centre for Craft & Design and William Morris Gallery.

Suitable for

• Any age

Website

http://www.wmgallery.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions-43/weaving-new-worlds

Chong Kwan’s The People’s Forest is a new body of photographic and sculptural work which explores the history, politics, and people of London’s ancient woodland. The works in the exhibition play with imitation and representation, modelling, collage, cutting and growing, bodily scale, and an interplay between two- and three-dimensionality.

A series of photographic portraits include people who look after, manage, and enjoy the forest, including arborists, volunteers, and people whom the artist met through the activities and events she hosted in Epping Forest. The photographs reference William Morris’ layering of medieval epics and themes in his childhood experience of Epping Forest and invites the viewer to get lost in the image surface whilst referencing the visual management or artifice of the ‘natural’ landscape.

Chong Kwan has also created a series of photographic prints, using collage techniques, which connect historic and contemporary moments and issues related to both Epping Forest, such as the M11 Link Road Protests, and forests more widely, including deforestation, which the artist has then hand-tinted with colour dyes created out of ingredients from the forest.

Further sculptural/photographic works and a work with which the viewer can physically engage will also feature in the exhibition.

Suitable for

• Any age

Website

http://www.wmgallery.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions-43/gayle-chong-kwan-104