Professor Simon Olding, Director of the Crafts Study Centre

Susie MacMurray, After Shell, 2006, Mussell shells stuffed with velvet, Commissioned by Pallant House Gallery (2006) © Susie MacMurray

Note: This article was written prior to the COVID-19 lockdown. Compton Verney Art Gallery and Park is currently closed until 11am on Friday 1st May. The exhibition runs until Sunday 14th June. We hope this piece inspires you to visit their website and keep in touch via their social media channels and when appropriate to do so, perhaps you might also visit the Art Gallery and Park in person.

Compton Verney Art Gallery & Park is the elegant and authoritative setting for two major temporary exhibitions. Cranach: Artist & Innovator surveys iconic paintings and prints by the great German Renaissance artist. It is a chance to see an astonishing array of historic works, counterpointed by response pieces from contemporary artists.

“Playful and provocative, this exhibition explores how clothes and textiles conceal, reveal and seduce through the lenses of art, design, fashion, film and dance.”

There is a contemporary textile response, too, in the second exhibition. A bravura diptych of Adam and Eve by Alice Kettle is shimmering-pink and curvaceously-figured. The work has been made expressly for the exhibition Fabric: Touch and Identity. It has a second job to do in addition to allude to Cranach: that is, to explore the thematic purposes of the textile exhibition which has been co-curated with scholarly rigour and emotional intelligence by Professors Kettle and Lesley Millar (from Manchester Metropolitan University and the University for the Creative Arts, respectively).

In the same room, bathed in the reflected light, is a small triptych by Beverly Ayling-Smith. Natural imagery is partly, softly obscured by a veil of lettering, drawn from Milton’s Paradise Lost. The colour palette segues from grey-dark to a soft but strong crimson-pink. The dynamic contrast of coloured cloths represents a departure in Ayling-Smith’s work, adding persuasively to her reach and ambitions, adapting heritage iconography and technique with digital manipulations, so that the past plays common chord with the present.

Fabric: Touch and Identity features works by Beverly Ayling-Smith, Annie Bascoul, Maxine Bristow, Nigel Hurlstone, Raisa Kabir, Alice Kettle, Susie MacMurray, Cathy de Monchaux, Ruta Naujalyte, Suzumi Noda, Liz Rideal, Nina Saunders, Alison Watt, Vivenne Westwood and Bob White, as well as the new installation Ogi no mai / Japanese Fanfare by Reiko Sudo and Adrien Gardère.

This exhibition is developed from the three year research project ‘The Erotic Cloth’, the first outcome of which has been the book The Erotic Cloth (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).