IRENE WALLER is mine.
Following on from last year’s wonderful programme Fabulous Fashionistas by Sue Bourne – I want to make a small homage to my MUM, Irene, – my model, my mentor and my trusted critic of many years.
She wears my painted clothes most days – she has a lot of them.
Irene Waller has written seminal books on textile as an art form – and the artists who made that happen in the 1970’s. She studied textiles in the 1950s at Birmingham College of Art and then ran the constructed textile department there until she took early retirement in the 1970s to pursue her career as a textile artist, writer and lecturer. Her documentation of the Lausanne Biennale of Contemporary textiles exists in boxes of 35mm slides which she treasures – and which I hope to digitalize, when she will allow!
Birmingham was my home town until I was 19 when I left after my foundation studies in art at Bourneville College of Art and from there I went to Canterbury College of Art to do my BA in painting – and Irene and Geoffrey moved to the top of the Malvern hills where they still live. Their house sits on an unmade road with a great view over the Welsh mountains. Tolkien drew from there to make the landscape sketches found in The Hobbit.
Mum had introduced me to the work of Gerhardt Knodel in her work as a writer on textile art, and contributor to the documentation of a major art movement – I went on to complete an MFA in Fine Art Textiles at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1980, studying under Joan Livingstone. The first Fashion Show, ‘I’m No walking Canvas’, happened here in 1981. Every year at Cranbrook students were asked to donate work for an auction, but at that time many of us made nothing tangible enough to sell. I persuaded 50 artists to make something which could be ‘worn’, and the event took place in the Cranbrook Museum, and was anarchic and wonderful.
I forgot all about that idea until several years later – when I made the first painted coat on the back of a white cotton lab coat in 1986. Mum lent me £500 to show the first few pieces at Chelsea Craft Fair in 1987, subsequently run by the Crafts Council as Origin. I shall always refer to her in my decision making, and shall always owe her the £500.
thanks Mum!