Christmas Exhibition showcases Craft Guild works

Oxfordshire Craft Guild’s Christmas Exhibition is comprised of a range of superbly crafted work by 33 members of the guild.

The show includes work by new Guild members, showing for the first time something that provides a contemporary freshness to the body of work as a whole.

This year the Guild’s annual Fletcher Prize has been awarded to textile artist Barbara Shaw for her piece Chastleton Chair, illustrated below, a piece which has subsequently been acquired for the Oxfordshire County Museum’s collection. Shaw has recently completed an Artist in Residency at the National Trust’s Chastleton House. During the residency she was particularly drawn to a 17th- century chair in the Great Hall: the subject for the piece. She describes her work as ‘painting’ with textiles and for this piece she has hand-stitched many scraps of fabric together, layer by layer, to build up the final image, the different textures and properties of the different fabrics each playing their part in creating light, dark, colour, depth and form.

Her skill is also demonstrated by her stitched self-portrait also on display, a witty representat-ion of herself which attracted much visitor comment and approval when she hung it alongside the ancestral portraits that furnish Chastleton’s walls.

Anne Arlidge and her assis-tant Alistair Malcolm both work in glass. They too are showing two pieces inspired by Chastleton. Their Green Man, inspired by its Green Man whom they have cast in translucent glass, his broad and leafy face proclaiming his magical properties. And a substantial piece, its shape based on a windowsill at Chastleton that houses the faces of several Green Men, each face linked to the other by the sinuous route taken by a large crack that bifurcates the sill.

Also working in glass is Judith Berger who uses deep oceanic blues combined with other colours to create fabulous seascape bowls and fused glass panels that speak of the complexity of the col-our and of the motion of the sea. Tlws Johnson also uses glass to create satisfying kiln formed pieces as in her seasonal rubicund red robin coasters.

There is a range of delicate silver jewellery: necklaces, ear rings and rings by Fiona West, Pauline Payne, Annik Pirou and Leonie Bennett, the latter employing interesting marquetry techniques and using a range of precious metals to create ornamental brooches. Rose Hallam’s photomontage range of jewellery includes a colourful suite of work based on Tutankhamun’s heart’s scarab. All of the jewellery would go well with Lizzie Hurst’s spectacularly stylish hats.

The exhibition also features the work of 11 ceramicists, whose work ranges from Audrey Stockwin’s classically simple and beautifully functional bowls to an extravagant range of stylised animals and birds as in Jeanne Jackson’s chicken inspired bowls, egg cups and toast racks and Richard Ballantyne’s rakish raku creatures. Ballantyne describes his creative process as a pyromaniac in seventh heaven!

Prize-winner: Chastleton Chair by Barbara Shaw

Then there are Eddie Kent’s formally geometric animals and Christmas trees, in raku fired earth and stoneware, and Nathalie Hamill’s stylised birds, including the delightfully solemn group of Emperor Penguins, illustrated right. There is woodwork to impress too. Richard Shock’s stylish bowls and platters play to the strengths of the grain and the texture, and in Shock’s own words ‘turn out the wood’s inner beauty’. Similarly impressive is Alexander Griffin’s elegant and simple furniture, where line is kept to a minimum and the sleek elegant forms that emerge are quite beautiful as in his Black Walnut Side Tables with Maple Stringing and his White Ash Table with Walnut Stringing.

The paper pieces include Amanda Hislop’s use of neutral papers, muslin, scrim and threads combined with layers of acrylic paint to create both two- and three-dimensional pieces as well as art brooches. They all speak of the shades of greys, taupes and creams that make up the compelling minimal colour palette of winter landscapes.

Graham Lester uses recycled magazines and paper to create substantial tactile bowls and pots, the print-making innovative with witty stripes and patterns.

The show features a Best New Work competition. Makers have been invited to submit a piece which they feel represents a new development in their work or practice: be it a fresh design, new glaze or other innovation.

Visitors to the exhibition are invited to vote for the piece they regard as best. There will be a draw at the end of the exhibition and one lucky member of the public will receive a £25 voucher to spend on a piece made by a Guild member.

Christmas Exhibition
Oxfordshire Museum, Woodstock
Open Tues-Sun until January 3
Call 01993 811456 to check openings