In February 2019, I was lucky enough to collaborate with St.Fagans, one of Wales' national museums, alongside my peers to hold an exhibition inspired by the two days we spent visiting the site to gather drawings and inspiration for the work.
My work was inspired by a variety of love charms that are held in their archives, and although there wasn't a large amount of known meaning behind the charms, I felt they were interesting in form as they portray a different side of St.Fagans as we often imagine the rows of decade houses and a large number of china ornaments - a small admiration of the ordinary and the old.
I composed a colour palette formed from the pale blue of Pen-Rhyw Chapel and the pink decade house, alongside a handful of colour located in the gardens' blooms and the blue sign of the famous 'Gwalia Store'. This formed a colour palette I noted that wouldn't often be associated with St.Fagans due to its heightened saturation, however was directly handpicked from the site itself.
I used the traditional printmaking technique of linoprinting to cut out and create textural silhouettes of the love charms, juxtaposed with digital drawing to add a dramatised modernity to the piece.
To form my final exhibition piece of a blanket, I combined these processes and printed a large illustration onto cotton jeska to create a lightweight but natural material item. I chose to exhibit my work in the Pen-Rhiw Chapel, due to its interior setting complimenting my colour palette well. It also allowed me to suspend my work from the beams, which not all of the buildings allowed.
To find out more about this work, and all of the work by others that went into this collaborative exhibition , a lovely zine was created by Linh Duong and Cameron Ridgway that you can find at the link below!
A big thank you to everyone involved - from tutors to peers, photographers, graphic designers, those that work at St.Fagans and everyone in between!
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