From Rags To Tea Towels

Sometimes I just like coming across some random objects, taking an image and then finding out more about them. Today is a case in point - the wonderfully striking portrait of the lady with grey and red hair with what appears to be gold leaf adorning her face - helpfully illuminated by a shaft of late afternoon sun - is a postcard promoting an art exhibition and the background is a tea towel brought back from a holiday in St Ives in Cornwall.

The art exhibition is for the British Turner Prize nominated artist Delaine Le Bas and is called Rags of Evidence and revolves around identity - how we present ourselves, how we are 'read' by others and how these narratives resonate through our culture. She has always used her own visual identity in her work playing with archetypes and stereotypes as a Roma woman, challenging others who see their identity as fixed. 
She has stated "people think they can tell me what I am because of what they think they know". Such assumptions have tested and plagued the Roma since the Elizabethan age, when they were seen as Moon people - other, outside, from somewhere unknowable and alien. Obviously such language still persists into our current political debates, when malignly constructed language desensitises us to the plight of many.
The exhibition itself focuses on the role the body and clothing. Clothing particularly is embedded on our way of being, and has always been a signifier of how we wish to project ourselves as well as a way for others to judge us. The installation uses hand-made and decorated clothing by the artist festooned with her own vocabulary of cartoon characters, slogans and challenges combined with drapery, floor coverings and photographic portraits to explore her subjects.

The tea towel is produced, alongside wall art, prints, glassware and soft furnishing, by a company called Earthworks who work from a studio overlooking St Ives Bay in Cornwall.
Their products are intended to encompass the way it captures the sense of place and the colours that make up St Ives whilst blending up to date designs with what was contemporary in the 1930's and 40's and as a response to living and working in West Cornwall on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, capturing a wider understanding of the coastal community and the history of the arts in the town.