Drinking Down The Light : Exhibition of textiles at Sewell Centre Gallery

Exhibition of 25 abtracted textile 'paintings' by Cassandra Wall. As we step into autumn we feel the seasonal shift - whether it is the shimmer of light on grecian seas or seasonal moon, tides and reflections - Cassandra's art is truly joyful, a true colour fest. It is also infused with a quiet meditative mindfulness that comes from the artist's buddhist practice of 30 years.

See gallery times below, and Talks (x2) on Saturdays 13 & 20 September at 2 pm.

Cassandra Wall composes moments in the landscape through colour and patterning. Her textile ‘paintings’ are hand-stitched patchwork in cottons, colour-matched to her subject. Although Cassandra acknowledges the origins of patchwork created out of thrift by women pioneers of 19th century America, her muses are contemporary Twentieth Century painters such as Agnes Martin, whose beautiful abstract expressionist paintings such as Drift of Summer celebrated the vast open spaces of the Saskatchewan prairies of her childhood. Also Anni Albers, pioneer of textile art and design, whose inspirations ranged from pre-Columbian art to Bauhaus.

Inspiration considered, Cassandra’s intention is founded in her Buddhist practice of 30 years. Celebrating nature and moments in the landscape has been the path for her in finding that quiet limitless space that we associate with meditation. The multiplicity of repetition in her patterning and use of colour impart a sense of oneness and inner calm that we seek from the natural world.

Whether it is the shimmer of light on turquoise seas, or blossom falling in Spring, Cassandra’s textiles articulate a certain nuance of light, colour and mood. Drinking Down the Light recreates the half-light of dusk over a Greek harbour infused with the indigos and lapiz blues of twilight. There is poetry and balm in her abstractions. Upflight captures the flutter of wings as doves take flight, their feathers dusty pink and buff. Her tessellations are complex - snowflakes falling silently in Snow into Water - as whites give way to midnight blues. Her Autumn Hedgerow is flush with damsons, sloes and rosehips.

Cassandra’s working process involves an initial response to the landscape collaged from torn, hand-coloured and sourced papers juxtaposed. Her paper studies are figurative but inform the colour and rhythm of her textile abstractions. These collages are stand-alone art works, but exhibited together with the ensuing textile, they make a beautiful pairing and a portal, one to the other.

Dungeness: Summer and Winter is a seasonal depiction of Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage on the longshore drift on the South East Coast where the tides pile up and wash away the shingle, re-sculpting the littoral shoreline. Stitched to create a quadrant of seasonality - the garden in summer is joyous in colour and form, set against the pared back winter landscape with ocean waves rolling in from The Channel. Cassandra’s collaged study captures the outlook from a small cottage on the shingle of life, Jarman’s retreat during his final years. Her ‘textile painting’ celebrates both the fisherman’s shed ‘as was’, tarred in black with Jarman’s distinctive yellow window frames - and the beautiful ‘boundless’ garden that he planted with native flints, flowers and marine shrubs. One can appreciate how his garden ‘without borders’ resonates with Cassandra’s Buddhist practice where ‘form and void are one and the same’.

In addition to a profound love of British landscape, from Heather Hills in the Peak District, to the Moon Tide series on the longshore drift of the Suffolk coast, Cassandra Wall has for decades explored Greece, capturing the magic of these ‘Islands of the Gods’ from Light on Grecian Seas, Ionian Islands to Dhodhekanisos, Sunset. Her textiles are experiential. They read as paintings, and thus we are able to share her moments in the landscape and immerse ourselves in the beauty of the world around us.