New Members 2016

Chair Welcomes New Members

New members Nigel Cheney, Caron Penney, Vanessa Rolf and Willemien de Villiers were welcomed by Chair, Sue Stone, at the 2016 AGM which was held in London last week. At the meeting past member, Hannah Streefkerk was invited back into the group bringing the total number of exhibiting members to fifty-six.

Nigel Cheney has a BA in Textiles, with Commendation in Art History and an MA in Textiles. He is a lecturer in Embroidered Textiles at NCAD and has been the Republic of Ireland Selector for the Lódz Tapestry Triennale, Poland, since 2000.

Professional duties have included being an External Examiner for the B.A. Textile Design, Bradford College 2002-2004. He is an expert in Industrial Multi-Head embroidery and has worked with several companies in Ireland and the UK.

Caron Penney uses both references to street architecture and structural comparisons between the warp and weft and the gridded road systems in New York.  Often these themes respond to the ebb and flow of the daily migration across the city.  The subject matter draws comparisons between societies need to function and the individuals need for identity and their subtle co-existence. This careful balance is represented in the meticulous repetition of patterns and shapes in her tapestries.

Vanessa Rolf looks to the relationship between the geography, mapping of movement and the recorded experience of a place. She says, “We travel through desire or necessity, and the expectations and preconceptions that we hold of our destinations are explored in my work. My pieces take their inspiration from passages of travel literature, maps and documentary photographs aiming to evoke the more transient and ethereal qualities of journeying”.

Willemien de Villiers is a South African artist and writer, currently residing in Muizenberg, Cape Town.

Her work is a dialogue between real and imagined microscopic biological phenomena, reconstructing the common cellular history of all living things through atomised patterning. The process of decay and disintegration, and the inevitable new growth and integration that follows, inform this major theme in her work, especially with regard to memory (personal, political and social).