Cloth and Culture Now - Whitworth Gallery

This major exhibition at the Whitworth Art Gallery brings together work by leading contemporary textile artists from Estonia, Finland, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania and the UK.

Textiles have played an important role in the cultural identities of these countries and the artists featured draw on those histories and traditions to produce inspiring new work.
Traditional meets modern as techniques such as tapestry, knitting and embroidery appear alongside newer technologies such as digital print, photography and fibre optics. Look out for an enormous range of materials too. You will find traditional fibre alongside bamboo, lead, paper, rusted metal and even bin liners!

The exhibition aims to examine textile as both a global language and as a medium that can express a sense of local and regional identity. cloth & culture NOW is accompanied by a beautifully illustrated catalogue, available from our Gallery Shop.

Cloth & Culture NOW is organised by the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia and curated by Lesley Millar, Professor of Textile Culture, University College for the Creative Arts .http://www.clothandculturenow.com/

View items appearing in this exhibition

Macclesfield College - Creative Arts for Employment

What do I study?

The course aims to provide students with a broad understanding of contemporary creative arts within a vocational context. It puts a special emphasis on the acquisition of skills in contemporary fine art disciplines such as: painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, installation, photography, digital media and contextual studies. It is both practice-based and work-based and aims to develop your creative potential as an individual and as a collaborator preparing you for employment or self-employment.Vocational skills such as entrepreneurial skills and the ability to reflect upon your own learning will be developed through the use of reflective journals and self/peer assessment. You will be encouraged to work collaboratively and develop the appropriate interpersonal skills for the creative industries.

What are the entry requirements?

You will be 18 or over with a level 3 qualification and have successfully completed a Diploma Foundation Studies course or have equivalentvocational experience/experiential learning.

What are my career opportunities?

On successful completion of this Foundation Degree, you may wish to progress to employment or self-employment as a Fine Art practitioner, a community based artist or a technical assistant. Alternatively, you may wish to undertake further study which will enable you to progress in related areas such as teaching and curating. This Foundation Degree also provides a direct progression route to a BA (Honours) Degree at MMU.

Press release

Art and Business go hand in hand

Artists exhibition at Macclesfield Library from Monday 27 October.

Macclesfield, 17 October 2008:
As part of the final year of the Foundation Degree in ‘Creative Arts for Employment’ the students of Macclesfield College will be exhibiting their work at Macclesfield Library from Monday 27 October.to Saturday 1 November

Macclesfield College Business tutor Mandy Orton said “This is an ideal showcase for the students, to display a variety of contemporary art in the town centre. I will be looking for something exciting myself as I have been searching for a piece of original artwork for my home”.

Entry to the exhibition is free and will include works in ceramics, print making, painting and textiles. Exhibits from the show will be for sale.

This will be the first graduation group for the course which combines contemporary art and business practices. On completion of the course students have the option of taking one further years study at University to gain a BA (hons) degree.

When is a yurt not a yurt ?

... when its a camera obscura !

As part of New Mills Festival a 16ft Yurt was turned into a camera obscura for the day. Sited in High Lea Park the Yurt was made 'light tight' (as dark as possible) with the 'pin hole' pointing towards The Hall to project an amazing image inside the Yurt.

The Hall was about 60 metres away from the Yurt and the image projected although upside down was very clear.

The camera obscura (Lat. dark chamber) was an optical device used in drawing, and one of the ancestral threads leading to the invention of photography. In English, today's photographic devices are still known as "cameras".

The principle of the camera obscura can be demonstrated with a rudimentary type, just a box (which may be room-sized, or even hangar sized) with a hole in one side, (see pinhole camera for construction details). Light from only one part of a scene will pass through the hole and strike a specific part of the back wall. The projection is made on paper on which an artist can then copy the image. The advantage of this technique is that the perspective is accurate, thus greatly increasing the realism of the image.

With this simple do-it-yourself apparatus, the image is always upside-down. By using mirrors, as in the 18th century overhead version (illustrated in the Discovery and Origins section below), it is also possible to project a right-side-up image. Another more portable type, is a box with an angled mirror projecting onto tracing paper placed on the glass top, the image upright as viewed from the back.

As a pinhole is made smaller, the image gets sharper, but the light-sensitivity decreases. With too small a pinhole the sharpness again becomes worse due to diffraction. Practical camerae obscurae use a lens rather than a pinhole because it allows a larger aperture, giving a usable brightness while maintaining focus.