Selvedge Magazine
Making Conversation by Mary Schoeser
I'm very excited to have this super article by Mary Schoeser in the Nov/Dec issue of Selvedge Magazine.
Mary came to see me in July on what felt like the hottest day of the year and the builders where in next door! We contended with the heat and the noise, drank iced water and had a lot of laughs. Mary's article reflects that my work is all about conversations which is rather lovely.
Scroll down for easy to read transcript
A conversation with Emily Jo Gibbs is, it turns out, largely about conversations. She speaks with an engaging passion about the craftspeople she has met in the course of her creation of ‘The Value of Making’, a series of portraits of makers tools, exquisitely rendered in layered silk organza, collaged and stitched to a linen ground. This project, celebrating the value of clever hands, began in 2017 and culminated in an exhibition at Collect Open in February 2018. In the beautiful little catalogue produced to document the show, what is striking is the artist’s descriptions of the conversations that took place during the process.
It all began with pincushions. Emily had some given to her by her mother, who had studied fashion and passed on sewing skills to her daughter. Having combined those home-taught skills with metalworking while finishing her degree at Wolverhampton University, she went on – after studying leatherwork in Walsall and shoe making in Leicester (“Very Boring! Leather wallets, men’s slippers...much more industry based. A shock to the system...”) – to run a successful company making designer bags from 1993-2006. Through London Fashion Week and similar shows, she came to know Bridget Bailey (see Selvedge blog November 02, 2018) and understood Bridget’s desire to drive her practice away from the relentless pace of the fashion industry and towards being an artist. “We decided we’d collaborate, booked a little gallery space, and started a conversation about making and textiles. I was keen to make a portrait but just through conversations and being in her studio thought to do tools and noticed her pincushion and that’s how it started.”
What emerged from Bridget’s reluctance (“so nice. When you are a maker you have a close affinity with your tools: they are like your friends...”) were two pincushion portraits, one for each of them. This was 2016. By early 2018 Emily had made visits to seven other makers. The first was the metalworker Ann Christensen (“We talked about people who have making skills and what a vast and diverse group we are.”) Then there was the shoemaker, Maiko Dawson (“We also talked about the makers of the tools, from British shoe-last manufacturers to Japanese scissor makers, and we compared notes on the sound of a good scissor action...”). Some of the tools depicted were surprising: furniture maker Sebastian Cox’s was represented by his shared CNC machine, glass blower Michael Ruh by cone-ended pipes and a bucket of water, weaver Eleanor Pritchard by a calculator (“I did ask Eleanor if she minded being represented as a calculator but she assured me it really is a vital tool.”)
From the days when her studio was in Camberwell Clerkenwell, she already knew potter Helen Beard and jeweller Sarah Pulvertaft (“What was really lovely was to go and have the conversations, with people who are positive about being makers. That can get lost in the mix when making a living...”). She has since continued the project, in 2019 making three pieces inspired by the lathes and mills in the engineering department of the Natural History Museum. Given her passion for championing manual dexterity and creative problem solving, it’s no surprise to learn that these pieces celebrate the great skill and knowledge of people like Steve Suttle at the NHM. Emily is on the lookout for another project like it. She gives an animated description of a tour of the Bentley factory (“brilliant combination of technology and hand skills. Have development room as well, for people designing things without materials knowledge. So now designers work in conjunction with skilled makers so that they don’t come a cropper. Fascinating.”)
Meanwhile, as we speak she is working towards an exhibition in early August called Vessels of Influence, a pop-up curated by Flow Gallery at St Peters Church, Cambridge, next to Kettle’s Yard. The other exhibitors are twelve ceramicists. The nearly-completed piece she shows me is 'Tea with Sun and Kaori' (Sun Kim and Kaori Tatebayashi). Sun is also based in Camberwell (“beautiful ceramics, origami-like soft forms”) but the portrait is not just a rendition of her pot. Asking what was used when they drank tea, the answer was the seconds made by Kaori, who shares Sun’s studio. (“So that’s her cup, a second. I love those stories. No point of making a picture of a piece, it’s the conversation.”)
It turns out that conversations also featured in Emily’s very first stitched portrait, of one of her two boys. Although to this day making limited edition bags for Gallery Kuga in Tokyo, when the bag business closed, “I had to get a job. Real life! Wasn’t making, sad about that, didn’t know what to do. Had a great tutorial with business mentor. She said, ‘loads of creative people suffer this so go away and make things for yourself without worrying about price points or markets.’ It took away all the reasons not to do something.” Looking in Selvedge magazine she saw a competition to make a doll’s bed; “oh I could do a doll” evolved into “I could do a portrait.” Silk organza from the handbag-making days was plentiful, and thus began the making of literal portraits, the first with painted details that were later eliminated as commissions arrived, to make them more affordable. In that first portrait, she stitched her own words into his hair, recording all her mixed messages, such as “be creative – but tidy!” The chuckle as she says this is appealing; clearly, she is reflective, even ruminative (“Bridget is kind. I say ‘procrastinating’ and she says, ‘that’s your process’.”)
Something of Emily’s warmth radiates from her quiet but perfectly observed depictions of objects and people (“when I’m teaching, I’m constantly saying LOOK”). Their pared-down graphic quality belies the carefully chosen layering of different colours of organza, the sparely but precisely rendered dots of stitches. (“The joy is in the hand stitch. Really labour intensive. They’re considered. Calm.”) And they speak to the viewer, carrying those conversations on.
Mary Schoeser
Mary Schoeser is a Textile Historian and Curator who has advised English Heritage, the National Trust, Liberty of London, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is Senior Research Fellow at the University of the Arts,London.