Cas Holmes

Writing on Red Walls

     Cas Holmes is an artist, teacher and author living in the UK. She trained in painting and photography at the University of Creative Arts, Kent followed by further scholarships studying paper and textiles in Japan and India. Working with textiles and mixed media, she creates textile collages using discarded and ‘found materials’. These are torn, cut, and re-assembled creating translucent layers, which connect drawing, painting and image, with clothe and stitch.

Preniac Grasses

     The Artist has a down-to-earth approach to life and her art takes her on flights of fancy, which evoke folk cultures, traditions and mythology with an abandon, which ignores all barriers. Sometimes figurative, sometimes wholly abstract she has an unerring faith in her feeling for her materials. Confidence pours from her work and with it a power and sophistication that brings to it an almost religious sensation of ancient wisdom revisited.

 

Red Bowl                             Spring Snow

     Cas is passionate about the environment and her use of recycled and found materials. Her imagery highlights the vulnerability of the wildlife that most of us overlook in our daily lives – the nature that shares our city spaces. Some of her work had been prompted by the start of the London Olympics. She remember the walks she’d taken in the Lea Valley before building work had started at the site, where she had stopped to take note of the beauty of the commonplace wildlife such as the dandelions, grasses, birds and moths that she came across. The work is wonderfully delicate and ethereal. Layering fine fabrics, with a subtle use of colour, she creates the atmospheric backgrounds for her hand and machine stitched images, highlighting the fleeting nature of such encounters.

             Tulip                           Amber Walls

     She is interested in recording the changes that might impact on the flora and landscape of South East of England and her adopted County, Kent. Holmes is looking at political and social as well as climatic change. Flooding, as witnessed in the American South and the Tsunami in Japan, and its impressive physical changes to the landscape raises issues about our fragile relationship with the local and global environment.

Natural History Kaleidoscope    

     Looking at translucent layers, connecting paint, mark and print with the found surfaces of fabrics and papers she seeks the 'hidden edges' of our landscape, the verges of our roadsides, railway cuttings and field edges, the places where our gardens meet the outside spaces. Worked with what Cas describes as 'stitch sketching' these atmospheric pieces seeking to capture a moment or thing before it is gone.

Arches                           Mendhi Book           

     The often-overlooked things of daily life and observations of the land inform her work. Connecting paint, mark and image she reflects the ‘hidden edges’ of our landscape, verges, field edges and wild spaces, ‘stitch sketching’ to capture a moment before it is gone. Her work is inevitably influenced by her visits to Japan but more as someone who would use that influence to reaffirm her own strengths. That is her originality.

Weeds by the West Door       Carkins           Bridges, Reflection

     Holmes' textured, translucent, and intricate textile art is a testament to the history of this medium, as well as the social and political undertones that it implies. Devoted to incorporating historical and found objects in her artwork, Cas creates layers of both fabric and meaning, inspired by her travels, her hometown of Maidstone in Kent, England, and her interest in the societal role of textiles both past and present. Her stirring work has been well recognized in her community; as the Pride of Britain award she received from the NRI® Institute for her research in India and the resultant body of work exploring her Romany gypsy ancestry.

After the Rain                           Counting Crows

     Her materials are overwhelmingly organic and appear to have been given new life. Paper ages and crinkles with a will of its own and is made exquisitely into a Japanese style panels allowing light to pass through, or are incorporated into one of her unique quilted hangings. Behind it all there is a sense of grand design under the control of the artist. It is both decorative and rich in symbolism.

Grassland Book

 

     The Artist is deeply moved by the stories of ordinary people's lives, the births, marriages and deaths; the diseases brought on by harsh working conditions and the way these hard facts are hidden from history, forgotten with the passing of time. Her work, often contain snippets of text or discarded materials and objects that have associations or that conjure up memories. There is always a dialogue with the materials she uses. They bring their own history, which is woven into the work.

Giant Hogweed                           Ginko     

     Cas Holmes makes art. If it happens to reference the techniques of the quilter, it is coincidence - same brush, different painting. Her work has a primitive quality that wanders the earthly through the ethereal. Translucent layers of painted fabrics, collaged papers or stitched bits combine and then recombine across different series of her work. Cas sketches regularly. She brings this quality to her thread painting; which is more thread sketching with frenetic stitch lines that capture movement and personality. The simplicity of her thread sketching brings a charm to her work and a sense of urgency, as if we need to look now to see a moment or thing before it is gone. This simplicity can also bring reassurance to any of us - to say that we need not worry about the perfection of every line of stitching. In this medium, we can cast off the yoke of perfectly spaced, even stitching and embrace the moment of "doing". Continuing to develop her techniques, drawing and use of colour remain the foundation for all her work. The fragments of found materials are layered and mark the passing of time, the rituals of making (drawing, cutting, gathering materials, machining, sewing) acting as part of the narrative of the work.

Imperfect Plant                         Bluebell       

     Her work relates to the natural and built world and the elements that make it up. She lives in a house which edges on a park bringing the Urban and 'Nature' together. Cas like to make drawings, take photographs and gather found materials from within my footsteps as part of the regular journeys she makes from her front door. The process of looking and recording helps to establish the environmental links between the built and 'natural' spaces as well as addressing issues of sustainable practice. She is interested in the open landscape, the shadows of marks made by man in the earth, the reflections in water and flooded fields, gardens and seasons changing. Holmes refers to this process in her book “The Found Object in Textile Art”, as 'Magpie of the Mind'.

Indian Journal                             Pendulous Dark Woods

     Cas Holmes regularly exhibits in the UK and abroad and enjoy working on collaborations and installations with other artists. This includes the installation “Curiouser and Curiouser” at Tunbridge Wells Museum and Art Gallery and workshops in Europe and Australia. Her book “The Found Object in Textile Art”, (published by Batsford 2010), looks at some of the processes.

     After obtaining a Fine Arts degree in the early eighties, her understanding of paper and related media was further enhanced through two periods of long-term study in Japan in the mid to late eighties (supported by the Japan Foundation and the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust).

           Traces: Installation, Rochester Cathedral

     In 1991, she was given a joint award with South East Arts and the British Council to research art based organisations and community groups in Canada. She focused on those, which used re-cycled and found materials in their projects. Exchanges, talks and workshops remain an important part of her practice and more recently she have studied and worked in Europe, India and Australia.

     Cas Holmes creates works for public and private settings and has pieces in collections around the world, including the Museum of Art and Design in New York, Arts Council England and the Sir Leonard Cheshire Foundation.

     To find out more about her you can visit her website:

     http://www.casholmes.textilearts.net

Bird Crow                              Cuttings   

Marsh Valerian                          Rouge         

 

Sandshadows                      Souls and Feather       

 Fen

Cas Holmes

Barbara Heller

 

Bamboo

 

            “Medieval tapestries were often political or religious parables clothed in classical allusions. I use this ancient art form with modern symbols and metaphors to circumvent the rational mind and reach people on an intuitive, emotional level. The familiarity and non-threatening nature of textiles allows me to seduce the viewer into taking a closer look at preconceived assumptions.

I draw on my heritage, my own photographs and old family photos, the mystical side of world religions, and my personal experiences to develop an iconography to express my passionate concern. I am concerned with humanity and its relationship to the environment, both natural and man-made, and to itself. We have lost our sense of who we are and how we fit into our world.”

                                                                                                                  Barbara Heller

Left Window           Passing Shadow            Right Window

            Tapestries and fiber based wall art in general is often stuck with the perception that it's an archaic craft, dating from medieval times and only existing as either museum pieces or reproductions thereof in the present day. Contemporary artists like Vancouver based Barbara Heller, however, take the time honored craft and transform it into a vital expression of modern concerns.

            Tapestry wasn't Heller's first choice in arts though. She started out as a printmaker, until an allergy to the chemicals forced her to switch careers.Her introduction to tapestry came in the form of an evening course in someone's basement. Later, inspired by a traveling show of Polish tapestry, she set up her first loom and taught herself by trial and error. She has been a full-time tapestry artist since 1980.

Ozymandias

            To act as a mediator requires an ability to accept as valid more than one point of view and to show alternative paths to resolution that all parties can agree to. In tapestry, politics partakes of an historical tradition that willingly shows the mutilations of war, the betrayals of kings, and the apocalyptic nature of fate in a way that is much like theater. Both Heller and Lurçat [French artist who revived the tapestry tradition after WW2] take the stage as mediators moving between real-world events and old-world history. To succeed in mediating a consensus requires an understanding of both the world around them and the strength of their medium. And neither of them could know in advance with any certainty whether the communities they spoke to would agree to discussion and be able to see the possibilities their mediations provide.

 

War Zones: Somalia                The Apple of God’s Eye         

            The Artist is concerned with humanity and its relationship to the environment and to itself. She is concerned with war and homelessness and poverty, which she believes results from the loss of our sense of who we are and how we fit into our world. These concerns are not always evident in her work, but they are always there as subtext. Viewing Heller’s work promotes meditation, and enhances our perceptions. The artist invites us to rethink ourselves not only in art but also in social and environmental justice. We are all integrated circuits. Her work is a process of restoration and an echo of the natural and man made world’s unremitting cycle of decay and renewal.

Sunspots

            Barbara Heller’s stunning tapestries carefully draw the line (in both senses of the term) between myth and history, past and present, art and craft, the individual and the community, the artist and her world, again and again underscoring the intrinsic interdependence of each binary pair. What sense, their work suggestively asks, can one have without the other? Where do the specific and the universal, the local and the global intersect?… What do we hide from or seek in both others and ourselves in the masquerade of everyday existence? What meaning does an individual have outside the community?…

 Still Life…With Bird                   Stones #19: Zion      

            Equally committed to fulfilling her fair share of responsibility to mend our world,   Barbara Heller, too, chooses to imbue an ancient art with new aesthetic, political and spiritual dimensions —a radical move that further positions both artists as leaders among a growing international movement whose aim it is to restore tapestry, mosaics, and other art practices similarly demoted to the status of craft or decorative art to the recognition they thoroughly enjoyed before the Enlightenment…

            Heller’s approach is rather inductive. Initially enticing the viewer by the tactile beauty of the yarns and the image itself, allowing time for the message behind the image to be absorbed, she slowly builds upon the constitutive elements of a nascent image and concept, allowing for the paradigmatic emergence of the larger whole to become manifest gradually throughout the piece and cumulatively throughout all her work.

Shiva Dances                         Red Poppy         

            In some of her series, Barbara Heller uses historical images. There she distills ideas from newscasts selecting images that comment on humankind’s historical struggle to live in dignity. Using tapestry with mixed media she expresses horrific implications resulting from international events. She weaves adults in scenes where they seem alien to their environment; children lost in poverty created by war; destroyed buildings become carcasses of hate; fragments of birds’ wings and bones imply inexplicable loss of life, freedom and joy. Initially the soft qualities of tapestry mask her terrifying visions. When the full impact of her intent is seen, the effect is ominous. It is demonic — not on her part, but what her art represents. Tapestry allows Heller to give reality to the unspeakable while drawing the viewer to wallow in texture and color before soliciting contemplation and a sense of responsibility to form the future…

    Surgeon      - Cover Up Series -    Afghani Woman 

            The life experiences and perspectives lead Heller to believe that allegiance to country, ethnicity and religion can be fool’s false truths. Instead, her art takes us into an international arena of politically sensitive artists where historical art, media, images and ideas applied to current events become powerful tools for social statements.

 Seagulls: The Herald                  Passages                         

   

            Barbara Heller is an artist who feels passionate about tapestry. Her art defines her life. She has exhibited widely locally, nationally, and internationally for the past thirty years and her tapestries have been featured in several books and been the subject of numerous articles. To promote all the fiber arts, and tapestry in particular, Barbara has organized symposia, written articles, given lectures, edited publications, taught workshops and curated exhibitions. She has represented Canada overseas and lectured on Canadian tapestry and her own work. She sat on the Board of the American Tapestry Alliance for eight years. She still volunteers with ATA as chair of their distance learning mentorship program and personally mentors two people. She founded the British Columbia Society of Tapestry Artists and is co-editor of the Canadian Tapestry Newsletter. 

Stonewall #5                   War Zones: Rwanda         

Currently she shares the Fiber Art Studio with three floor-loom weavers and a knitter. She is the animated display in the corner window and she can be seen weaving tapestry almost every day. The studio is on Granville Island in Vancouver and is open to the public.

For more of Barbara's work you can check her Website:

http://barbaraheller.ca

The Shaman    - Seagull Series -      The Patriot              

Barbara Heller