Artist

An Atlas of Stitches

Early maps, such as the famous Mediaeval Mappa Mundi, along with more recent cartography, such as the maps made by Andrew Redmond Barr, show a glorious inattention to accuracy in scale and measurement and instead display a totally subjective view of the world. For example, an over-sized house might be nestling next to a tiny sea, thereby inflating the importance of the owner of the house and making the sea seem just a little less frightening into the bargain.  Each of us views our own world from our own peculiar perspective and enjoys giving natural and man-made places made-up names.  We connect those places with events that have been important in our lifetime and so, if we were to represent them in visual form, they would appear much larger than they would in 'real' life.

I have long enjoyed the early maps of the land around my studio, with their curious spellings and charming drawings of crops and springs and dwellings. And I have used maps and aerial views of this landscape as the basis for much of my work over the years, filling the textile surface with clues to the nature of the land and my relationship with it, by using print-making, stitch and collage, words and symbols.

This week is an opportunity to develop your own language for mapping or illustrating your world through stitch and we will use the maps local to my studio as the basis for the week’s activities. We will make short walks into the landscape so that you can make visual records of the shifts in perspective as you move from a high to a low vantage point and as you turn through the points of the compass. And we will do a little creative writing too, so that you have personal descriptive words that may be written into your stitched work as you make your own textile interpretation of the dramatic landscape of Assynt.

The textile surfaces we will work on will be printed, marked and coloured by your own hand and then stitched and collaged to create the imagery. The aim is that, rather than a literal representation of your surroundings, by the end of the week you will have created a playful memory map, full of colour, atmosphere and details selected to express your experience of a week in this part of the Highlands.

Please click on an image to see the full picture.

Jan's studio is in Elphin, overlooking the magnificent mountains of Suilven, Canisp, Cul Mor and Cul Beag. This remote location means that accommodation is a little more difficult to find, but the experience of visiting this area makes the search well worthwhile. Many course participants opt to stay in Ullapool, which is 20 minutes drive away. It is a most picturesque fishing village, with a good range of accommodation to suit all budgets. There are many restaurants and takeaways and shops, as well as some evening entertainment, should you have any energy left at the end of that day's workshop. And students often group together and car share for their daily trip up the road, past Stac Pollaidh, to the studio. Please look at the Accommodation links page to find out more.

To read about an innovative community partnership approach to preserving and improving this landscape for the benefit of all, have a look at Coigach and Assynt Living Landscapes. To find out about the fascinating geology of this area go to North West Highland Geopark.