La Fab sur Mill brings textiles and photography to Chelsea this May
Tashi Farmilo
La Fab sur Mill is opening two new exhibitions this spring, with a vernissage from 1 to 4 pm on May 9 that will give visitors a chance to meet both artists in person.
A garden on paper
Claire Huneault's photographs of her Chelsea rose garden look, at first, as though they might have been made a century ago. The edges dissolve. The blacks are deep and velvety. Light appears to come from somewhere within the image rather than falling on it from outside. These are not accidents of processing but deliberate artistic choices, rooted in the Renaissance sfumato tradition and the tonal richness of mezzotint printmaking, realized as fine art prints on 100% cotton paper in the intimate P'tite Galerie.
Huneault, who is also an author and publisher, accompanies the prints with two editions of a poetry collection, Juin / June, issued through her own imprint, Éditions À la craie. The poems give a voice to a rose shrub imagined as a feminine figure stirring back to life after winter, a parallel to the photographs that is less illustrative than atmospheric, two bodies of work in quiet conversation with each other.
Painting with yarn
There is nothing accidental about a punch needle painting. Every centimetre of colour is placed deliberately, yarn drawn through taut monk cloth with a needle, one pass at a time, until an image accumulates out of what is essentially organized repetition. Chelsea's Judy Mason has made this exacting process her medium, and this spring she shares her new body of work.
Mason works in collaboration with her husband Paul Mason, who designs each piece. Together they stretch the monk cloth over a wooden frame before Judy begins the slow work of filling in the outlined areas by hand. When a piece is finished, the staples come out, the cloth is mounted, and what remains is a textile painting with the density and quiet authority of something that took real time to make.
Both exhibitions run from May 9 through June 21 at La Fab sur Mill, 8 chemin Mill in Chelsea.