Running parallel with Ferret's exhibition at the Pavilion was 'A Bucketful of Fabric', work by Magie Relph and friends, at Llangollen Museum. The museum is an unusual 'round' building (actually a polygon), built as a library in the third quarter of the twentieth century, and the gallery space curves around the interior in a complete circle, with the centre open to the ground floor. The first quilt (above) is 'Say Africa' by Magie Relph. Magie and Bob specialise in African materials - visit The African Fabric Shop to read all about their fabrics, embellishments, travels and history, and you can see more quilts on their African Quilt Gallery page.
The width of the gallery is around 8 feet, so it isn't possible to get a long way back from the quilts (unless you view the exhibition from the opposite side of the building of course), but the way the exhibits curve away from the viewer mean that the whole exhibition is glimpsed in one view as you reach the top of the stairs. The pale brick walls are lined with 4ft wide panels in pairs on the same plane, so it is ideal for smaller works which repay close inspection. Since last year, the museum has installed narrow-beam spotlights for most of the panels, which I thought were very effective as we could use them to cast a beam across the quilts, enhancing their three dimensional quality. However, this means that many of the photos have a bright spot towards the top of the quilt - this is the spotlight beam and not the camera flash.
I have so much to catch up on today, so I'm going to publish this post without the photo captions for now (to keep my blogposts running in the right date order!) but I'll be back to caption them in the next few days. They are in the same order in which they were hung.
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