Rochester Art Gallery
Date: 8th October 2021 - 15th January 2022.

All that Remains: Thirty Years in the Making by Neil Bottle

This new body of work, first shown at Contemporary Applied Arts and the Ruthin Craft Centre, celebrates acclaimed textile artist Neil Bottle’s 30 years as a textile designer.

Neil’s fascinating textile hangings are inspired by family photographs, a sense of time passing and how we remember things – in both real and false memories.

The textile prints are accompanied by personal, sentimental objects that were the starting point for many of the stories Neil is telling.

Commission for the Worshipful Company of Dyers, London, Tender 550th Anniversary (2021).

I’m excited to announce that I have been working on a new commission for the Worshipful Company of Dyers, London, Tender 550th Anniversary (2021).

The commission is to create an artistic timeline on fabric, representing the use of dyes as they were introduced through the centuries, to the present day. The artwork consists of two 3m long panels. One will depict the realm of Natural Dyes and the other Synthetic dyes.

I’ve attached a detail below of the Synthetic Dyes frieze, in which the chronology of synthetic dyes commences from left to right beginning with the city of London skyline, which is a blur of movement and colour in swirling shades of violet and purple. William Perkin looks wise and masterful surrounded by colour chips of mauvine, which he discovered in 1856.

The hexagon shape represents both the symbols of dye chemistry and the classic honeycomb motif used in Shibori dying.

The artwork is a combination of hand drawing, painting and collage combined with digital design techniques which has been digitally printed at high resolution onto silk. The works are now complete and I’m waiting for a date for the grand opening (date to be announced as Covid has resulted in some delays).