Extract from the catalogue, ’Nigel Hurlstone: Wind From the Feet of the Dead,’ published to coincide with the exhibition at RCC 13th January-17th March 2024. Published by Ruthin Craft Centre.

‘Wind from the Feet of the Dead,’ by Nigel Hurlstone, is an exhibition that treads softly between fact and fiction, the real and imaginary, presence, and absence. A phenomenal collection of embroidered self-portraits depict the artist wearing an array of different costumes that transform him from cricketer to curate, pompous policeman to a knitting pattern adonis. We see one man, but many people. The portraits are a direct manifestation of disease and drug induced hallucinations experienced when Hurlstone was a patient in hospital. They are the storybook of his mind at that time; one full of phantoms and fantasies about the person he would have liked to have been or feared encountering.

This ominous cast of characters may seem familiar. The aesthetic and colouring of some portraits are those one might discover in a 1950’s domestic family album. Others may resemble characters lifted straight out of the Ealing comedies but turn a corner and we could be in a sepulchre with Holbein the Younger’s ‘The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb’ (1521). Viewers are confronted by a 4-metre embroidered image of Hurlstone laid out as if in final repose albeit for a defiant middle finger that gibes indignantly at mortality. There are other images here too that show the body in all its frailty and weakness. Stripped of its garb and finery, we see the reality of skin and bone; it is the body of the artist slowly giving way to disease.

As a collection of pictures, some exhibits are unnerving, whilst others entertain and are bursting with nostalgic charm; it is impossible not to raise a smile. They could be portraits of the eccentric who lived next door, the uncle who visits at Christmas with crackers and cake, but also images of slow-moving hallucinations that appear when night falls. En masse, they prompt the need to look over one’s shoulder, stiffen at the unexpected creaking of a gate or as the east wind blows, listen to the ‘Wind from the Feet of the Dead.’

Printed onto cloth and then embroidered, each portrait is disrupted through a veiling of thread; characters appear and disappear as if following the slight of a magician’s hand. A myriad of stitches play on the surface of the cloth making for subtle shifts in rhythm, colour, and light. Hurlstone’s dissection of the images through vertical tonal stripes also takes us to the photographer’s dark room where exposure tests move across the image until the light is just right. This work is made out of the same exacting precision and alludes as much to the magic of silver, bromide and paper as it does to needle and thread.

Whilst the portraits may be mute, Hurlstone has written a series of short stories that sit alongside these embroidered images. In these audio works, adapted directed and produced by Steve Doherty of ‘Giddy Goat Productions’, Hurlstone takes us from the imaginings of his mind to the actuality of the hospital ward. These stories tell tales of people we might know, sometimes the people that we are, negotiating the end of life or chronic illness in predictable but also astonishing ways. Narrated by the artist and staring luminaries such as Sue Johnston, Isy Suttie, Rebecca Wilson, Sion Pritchard, Rhian Green and Tudur Owen, these stories possess a similar quality to the portraits. They disarm us through the deployment of familiar tropes and a cast of characters that make us laugh out loud but also bristle with unease. The rather camp man in Fairisle might be sat beside us, telling tales whilst convivially pouring tea, but do be prepared for something rather nasty to be lingering in the bottom of the cup.

This exhibition is the result of a mammoth undertaking of both labour and unbelievable dedication; it is captivating in terms of content, and spellbinding in its craftsmanship. Its ambition and realisation is all the more compelling since Hurlstone lives with COPD and advanced emphysema. The main thrust of his current artistic practice and writing is to advocate on behalf of people living with chronic illness and to help expand our current understandings of what ‘care’ is and reveal the complex dynamics of a four-letter word that he maintains is, “…quick to speak, easy to politicise, but seemingly impossible to fathom.”

The embroidered artworks and stories in this exhibition, ask much from the viewer in terms of confronting their own mortality and picturing the unnerving journey that many of us will tread before the end of life. But it is also full of humanity. We are never abandoned to tears because Hurlstone is all around us in the gallery space, his warmth, hope and laughter providing comfort in moments of disquiet. But this exhibition is not an anaesthetic nor a prescription for how to make things better. Instead, it gently unravels perceptions of self but leaves us sufficiently intact to leave the gallery space feeling changed, and if not stronger, certainly wiser.

Commission for ‘The Temple of Peace,’ Hawarden Castle, Flintshire. 2023

This commission involved the production of two embroidered portraits for installation at the ‘Temple of Peace,’ Hawarden Castle, Flintshire. The ‘Temple of Peace,’ is the old study of the former Prime Minister, William Gladstone, and remains perfectly preserved. The portraits are of Vera Brittain (1893-1970) and her daughter, Shirley Williams (1930-2021). Each portrait was derived from an archive image that was digitised, printed onto cloth and stitched. They depict the sitter at life size and are installed on either side of Gladstones desk, as if in conversation. Mother and daughter appear and disappear, floating somewhere indecipherable between threads, both absent and present. They may be inviting debate with Gladstone, moving towards argument, or hoping for accord; whatever the consensus they may reach it will always be fictional, but nevertheless, one that may prompt real conjecture as to the ‘what if’s’ of history.

The embroidered portraits of Brittain and Williams introduce the figurative presence of a mother and daughter to the study, who in the century following Gladstones death, worked tirelessly for greater social and economic justice, the rights of women and political reform. Williams would be instrumental in re-shaping the Liberal party in its entirety following its merger with the Social Democratic Party in 1988 and would become the matriarch of Liberal politics at Westminster for over 50 years. Vera Brittain was equally tireless in challenging political, moral and human injustice through her writing. Her publications ‘Testament of Youth’ (1933), ‘Testament of Experience’ (1957), and ‘Letters to Peacelovers’ (1939), would convey the personal devastation of war from a woman’s perspective and prove to be seminal texts. Brittain’s writing, combined with an active involvement with platforms such as the ‘Anglican Pacifist Fellowship’, would help to give women’s experience a voice and position them as central agents of change in a tumultuous world order.

Studies are places where we might succumb to the pleasures of daydreaming and glimpse the future. Gladstone might not have envisaged the extent of that future change, either to his own political party or indeed, to the entire world order, shattered and re-formed by the catastrophes of World War following his death. The presence of Brittain and Williams at his desk marks that trajectory of change and begins a mythical conversation between these three notable political and social pioneers.

The commission was made possible and initiated by the Hawarden Estate and was curated by Helen Rees Leahy, Professor Emerita at the University of Manchester.

Image of Vera Brittain (1893-1940) courtesy of McMaster University Library Digital Collections
and the Vera Brittain Will Trust.
Image of Shirley Williams (1930-2021) courtesy of Mirrorpix.

All images of artwork and installation courtesy of Charlie Gladstone and the Hawarden Estate.

The Festival of Quilts 2023

Fine Art Textile Award Winner

The (dis)comfort you feel is life

Arts Council Wales Funded Project (December 2021-July 2023)

This project involves the artist working in collaboration with Ruthin Craft Centre to develop and manufacture new work that employs stitched artefacts, storytelling and performance to offer insight into the ways that we live, and how these are challenged by life-changing events.

A series of stitched self-portraits and short stories for performance explore personal conjecture and identity; questioning who we are, what might have been and what could have been realised if different choices had been made. Wearing garments collected over years as examples of excellent tailoring, sartorial agency, modish style or extraordinary functionality, I make a fleeting personal transformation. When worn on the body and captured through the lens, they mimic a host of masculine stereotypes, professions and leisure pursuits, reinforcing the potential of garments to oscillate between their practical, gendered and fashionable territories into uncharted psychological, sexual, emotional and cinematic terrains. Printed onto cloth and then embroidered, I disrupt the image through a veiling of thread; the subject appears and disappears as if following the slight of a magician’s hand. The portraits speak of my enduring fascination with ‘dressing-up,’ a conjuring trick that allows a glimpse of other lives, from cricketer to curate.

This project develops the potential of using the embroidered portrait in conjunction with performative narratives to reveal the drama, complexities and frustrations of how we really begin to sort out living when life is ruptured by ill-health or when the end of life comes into view. Tales observed from self-experience, collected in ambulances, waiting rooms, hospital wards and rehabilitation groups expand and puncture the playful conjecture presented in the embroidery by colliding the visual with stories that will be familiar to any of us who have spent time in a hospital or cared for someone who has. They mirror that world whilst puncturing the familiar with gently violent twists and turns. They are stories full of humour and indignation that show the foibles and fortitude of people negotiating adversity and confronting change.

The work will be exhibited at Ruthin Craft Centre, Denbighshire in 2023 and has been made possible through funding from Arts Council Wales.

SERIES

‘Strands of Place and Time,’ 11th July-3 November 2019

 Gawthorpe Textiles Collection project funded by Arts Council England in partnership with Manchester School of Art, Action Factory and the British Textile Biennial

The Textile collection at Gawthorpe Hall, Padiam, is a cornucopia of the wonderful and the mundane. It is refreshing to find a collection which had as its premise, not just the acquisition of textiles for the sake of satisfying the passions of a collector, but one which was purposefully accumulated with the intention of it becoming a resource for learning. Having worked within the Higher Education sector teaching Embroidery for the last twenty-five years, I have had the good fortune to know how invaluable such a resource can be for engaging students in the craft of Embroidery and showing the potential of this magical language. (The embroidery programme at Manchester had its own teaching archive, which held samples from students dating back from the 1970’s to the present day). Textiles, and especially Embroidery, is brought to life by such resources; they are so much more than silent artefacts.

The archive at Gawthorpe, has a voice, character, age and identity in which we access the maker directly. We can witness their skills, sometimes exquisite and sometime faltering, learn something of their lives and how those lives were lived. They allow us to look backwards in time in order to move forwards into the present, and in the Gawthorpe archive, there is another voice which chatters away too. It is that of Rachel Kay Shuttleworth, whose cataloguing of her collection is a joy to behold. It is anything but impartial. There are withering comments about the quality of certain samples, yet high praise offered for others. It is a mark of her vision and progressive philosophy that she understood that learning is not only realised through encountering the sublime, but is also to be found in the ordinary, the unrealized and occasionally, what she considered to be the profoundly ugly. It is this which became the focus of my response to the collection.

 Within this archive are many souvenir postcards from soldiers serving in the trenches during WW1, sent back home to friends and relatives. These items are not unusual or particularly rare, but are in excellent condition. The images on the cards are far from faded and written in gentle script on the back, are voices that speak to their loved ones with fondness and respect. These voices express the hopes and fears of warfare and are remarkable in their tone. Emotion is never given full reign; words are couched in the politeness of the era and horror disguised by civility. Expressions of love are present, though subdued, often veiled in concerns and worries over the general health of those left at home. Though this is often followed by the rather telling plea of, ‘write soon.’

The cards are stitched in silks and remarkably well preserved. The stitching expresses sentiments and images of patriotic spirit. Flags and words mingle together cheering ‘Hurrah for England!’ or making a plea that ‘God be with you till we meet again,’ whilst some assure Mum and Dad that ‘Your Soldier Boy,’ is OK. It is hard to pinpoint what and where the ‘true’ narrative lies in these cards. There is a story to be told, but one disguised and shrouded in the need for secrecy and maintaining a ‘stiff upper lip’. This work speculates as to what the narratives, often expressed in the ‘unsaid’ may be. ‘Stuck up with tape,’ is a short story written and read by Hurlstone in the gallery space in response to the discovery of the postcards at Gawthorpe, and the tales that they tell.

 This work, however, is not some attempt at historical re-enactment or an endeavor at resurrection.

The story being told releases the embroidered souvenir card from the context of lives once lived, in order to reveal a poignancy and universality of truth that has resonance to current lives and loves, both lost and found. It pays testament to human vulnerabilities and foibles but also celebrates the thrill of

gossip and chit chat, the yearning for romance and love alongside the complexities of how we come to understand ourselves and others through learning how to sew.

Supported by:

The Sleepers

Eyes maybe closed tight, though this does not bring blindness. They flicker with unspoken desires or veil nightmares that will be remembered long after sleep has left. Sleep restores memory but it also makes them too. Eyes may be open, but the body and mind still far from being awake. Eyes maybe closed, but sleep may not be near. A hand reaching out may invite affection or be a request for solitude. And on stirring, smiles can reflect the joy of being alive, of a new day dawned, but also be the preamble for tears. Waking can be full of regrets; the moment that we enter back into a reality that is not wanted. And so we smile at the same time as we cry. Nothing is certain in this state between waking and sleeping; it is the moment when we are the most content or anxious. It is the moment when energy comes to give muster to the day or when strength gives way to weariness, and if we are lucky, helps sleep come.

The work hopes to capture this most illusive contradiction of our existence but also adopts an exclusively gendered representation. It hopes to visualise the often enigmatic existence of men’s emotional lives, framing these small moments of uncertainty and vulnerability with warmth and tenderness.

However, these pictures are no mere facsimiles of a photograph. Enlarged, printed onto fabric and then meticulously stitched using a myriad of ombre threads, the image is veiled and blurred into a richly patterned cloth. These sleeping men appear and disappear, floating somewhere indecipherable between threads. And between those threads lies joy and anguish, terror and pleasure, restlessness and comfort; an invitation to intimacy and a plea to be alone.

‘Imagine?’

‘Imagine?’ confronts viewers with a traditional commemorative image of a school trip to Paris in 1929. Boys beam at the camera; coy, optimistic and excited about crossing boundaries in a bid to expand their lives, loves, experiences and understandings. These boys would soon become soldiers and cross continents with a very different agenda. Few ever came home.

 These textile re-presentations encourage the viewer to re-imagine key moments of human passage; be those of desire, fear, mourning or pleasure. Epic in their scale, their translation attempts to locate the heroic in the humble and make us question where and when our own lives maybe shown, told and re-told in the future of our histories.

Risky Resemblances and Imagine

Images in old photographs often disappear beneath a silvered surface; chemicals that washed the paper to make them come into being eventually take them back to a state of faded oblivion. Like aged bodies, they bruise easily until disappearing from view; the stories they tell becoming hushed before falling silent. These works attempt to resist that silencing. Captured onto cloth through digital print and stitch, they release the snapshot from the context of passed private pleasures in order to reveal a poignancy and universality of truth that has resonance to current lives, loves, traumas and tragedies.

 ‘Risky Resemblances’ depicts two relatives of the artist; brothers bearing an unmistakable familial resemblance. Both went to war and one was killed. The other returned home and was immediately courted by the widow of his brother. They married. A year later, both committed suicide. It was known that the widow had married the resemblance of her husband in a bid to mourn him and find happiness. The brother had married the widow in a bid to assuage the guilt of survival. Both found neither happiness, a means to mourn or a way to love.

What Pleasure?

This work primarily focuses on the translation and re-contextualisation of a single collection of homosexual fetishist snapshots taken between 1910-1950 by the Englishman, Captain Montague Glover. Combinations of embroidered and digital print methodologies have been utilised to release the snapshot from the context of an individuals private pleasure and reveal the historical poignancy and potential universality of the images when they are read both through lens of history, and significantly, through the medium of cloth and stitch.

 New iterations between cloth, image and stitch are realised in this work through epic translations of the domestic snapshot on a scale remote from the original artefact. Images are re-printed at human scale rather than the thumbnail gauge of the original, thereby revealing more acutely the sexual display of the model and the detail inherent to their militarisitc ‘costume’ displayed in their state of dress and (un)dress. These individual scenes of fantasy played out in the single frame are re-worked to read collectively as if occupying a stage set. The erotic pose of the models now plays out not in the private realm, but in a deliberately open arena set for collective, rather than individual perusal.

This deliberately brings into the question fundamental issues of how we engage with the erotic image within a public space, and how the medium of cloth can assist in both re-constructing and de-constructing both the aesthetic, content and context of it. Stitch methodologies are employed to deliberately veil the printed image and break the surface of the cloth. The subjects that gaze out at us become embedded in a surface that forces the viewer to shuffle through a reading of the image against a blur of dominant vertical stitched patternation. The photographic time exposure test strip where images recede and advance is deliberately referenced, thereby bringing to the work, not only the presence of the model, but the fetishist at work in the manufacture of his own photographic pleasures.  

However, this work also reveals Hurlstone as the maker as much a fetishist at play as the original photographer. The intensly time consuming and intricate handling of the stitch processes utilised in this work involves an intimacy, contact and knowledge of the image that goes far beyond their intial purpose of charging and stimulating a sexual moment. And this knowledge of the image, bought about through the process of stitching, makes for a relationship with that work that is itself simultaneously sexual and overtly voyeueristic, as much as it is based on any technical and aesthetic judgements relating to the production of the final artefacts. The resulting textile is charged with sexual content in new and unexpected ways and is ultimately meant to question what sexual pleasure is, and where and when it might be located.

Link to show at Five Years Gallery, London