Many thanks to North Wales TV and interviewer Alice Oliver for kindly featuring my exhibition at Mostyn Gallery, Llandudno, in the North Wales Live news programme. I’m very pleased to be showing work at Mostyn, a beautiful Victorian gallery known for its contemporary art programme as well as the high quality of art and craft shown in the retail gallery. The exhibition, which is called ‘Last Words’ is in Gallery 6 and is open to the public until 27th January 2019. Admission free.

My statement displayed alongside the work in the gallery:

My brothers and I scattered our mother’s ashes in May 2012. We stood looking out over the rape fields of Lincolnshire, having walked up the lane towards the ‘Cliff’. It was a place that meant a great deal to our mother and she had written about it on many occasions. Throughout 2003, she had used her daily walk with the dog as a way of focusing her concentration, as a walking meditation. Every day she would walk at the same time of day, on the same route and try to absorb everything she saw around her until she got home, when it would all be written down in minute handwriting… in order to fit it all on one page, she said. She wrote about the passing of the seasons, the sky, the weather, plants, trees, fields, crops and all the birds she saw, including rooks, swallows and gulls.

Nine years later, she was terminally ill and had still not finished transferring her notes to the laptop in order to edit them, and so I persuaded her to let me help. The task of transcribing the tiny handwritten words was extremely difficult and we agreed that she should read the notes while I typed. In this way she relived the walks and our time together during her last months had an added purpose.

In some of the pieces on display here I have used a fragment of my mother’s tiny writing blown up very large to produce an abstract gesture. In many of the pieces I have borrowed phrases from her writing for titles.

Other works, the pieces involving envelopes, were inspired by hearing that some people believe that a white feather is a message from a loved one who has passed away. While I remain somewhat sceptical, this idea provided a starting point for new images.

All of the work here has been created using printmaking techniques, including relief printing, stencil and collagraph. I have long been working with found natural objects and in these pieces I have used feathers and grass. The latest pieces of birds are made up of around five layers of printing on fine Japanese paper. They mark a move towards combining drawn image with direct impression.

I was excited to get a telephone call earlier in the week to say that I had won second prize in the North Wales Open at Clywd Theatr Cymru, Mold. I went along today to meet the other prize-winners and receive a cheque for £500. The exhibition is held every summer and is open to artists living in Wrexham, Flintshire, Denbighshire, Conwy, Gwynedd and Anglesey. I had entered two pieces and the one below is the piece that was awarded the prize. I made a cut paper stencil of rooks in flight and combined this with impressions of feathers printed directly onto layers of almost transparent Japanese paper. The exhibition is on until 24th August.

'There are rooks flying, blowing in the wind' 2017

There was a great atmosphere in the studio today with four people taking part in a relief printing workshop: Cut and collage – creative printmaking. This is a really simple process involving line drawing, cutting and collage (as the name suggests!) but as you can see, the resulting prints can be very striking.

Kelly

Elin

Nia

Betty

I was pleased to be a small part of a community consultation recently, led by Lorna Jenner, regarding a new piece of public art to be situated near Flint Castle in North Wales. The consultation took place largely in an empty shop on Flint’s Church Street, which was completely and wonderfully transformed by Lisa Heledd Jones of StoryWorks into the ‘Story Shop’! Local residents came in to give their views, memories and stories of Flint and its residents. My involvement was a drop-in workshop at the Story Shop, in which I provided ready-made printing plates for visitors to print on my portable press; two workshops with pupils from Ysgol Maes Hyfryd and Ysgol Pen Coch; and a workshop with residents from Greenbank Villas, Flint, and The Quay project, Greenfield. An exhibition, which includes prints made during these workshops, is now at Flint Library until August 2018.

Photograph by Lisa Heledd Jones

Photograph by Lisa Heledd Jones

I have just delivered work to Mostyn, a lovely gallery in Llandudno, for the new showcase ‘Into the Wild’, which celebrates the great outdoors and the flora and fauna that inhabit the countryside. Hope these look wild enough! Two pieces with positive and negative impressions of feathers, called ‘Feathers Floating IV’ and ‘Feathers Floating V’, together with a couple of the monoprints made during last year’s Helfa Gelf, ‘Sweet Pea’ and ‘Convolvulus’. They are all beautifully framed in limed oak, particularly appropriate for the feather pieces I think.

The exhibition runs from 3rd February to 3rd June 2018. There will be a host of other work to see too: original prints, artworks and contemporary crafts.

I am currently working on combining impressions from natural objects with drawing. The drawings are in the form of cut paper stencils of birds – gulls and rooks. I have been inking feathers and printing them onto fine Japanese paper – Maruishi – but with the stencil in place the feathers form the background to the birds. Several layers are combined to make the image. You can see the finished layers working together to form the final image on my Instagram page. https://www.instagram.com/p/Bes4jA-BeYP/?taken-by=ruththomasart https://www.instagram.com/p/BhzXMLUDHtH/?taken-by=ruththomasart

The photographs here show the stencils at various stages of printing.

I’m excited to be working on a commission now, for someone who wrote her PhD on rooks!

The first workshop of 2018! A new Criw Celf group of 10, 11 and 12 year olds from Wrexham. This is the first time I’ve worked with Criw Celf in Wrexham. A lovely group of twelve children made some super collage printing plates, inked them with a roller and printed them on my portable press.

I’ve been working on a commission recently for a friend who bought ‘Messages II’ earlier in the year and has asked for another similar piece. When printing the Messages series I placed individually inked envelopes carefully on the bed of the press, followed by the feathers, followed by the damp printing paper. It was all too easy for one or two of the parts to become misaligned during this process, so I ended up with a fair few prints that were perfect except in one or two places where an envelope had been nudged out of line! For the new piece I decided to use the same approach as in ‘Messages IV’. I have taken the good parts of some of these prints, carefully cut them up and combined them in a collage. Finished work below.

I thoroughly enjoyed Saturday’s workshop with five people here printing from natural objects including bracken, acer, grasses, lavender, horsetail, feathers and sweet pea. Beautiful work everybody – well done!

Some lovely feedback:

“I had a fabulous day. Something so refreshing and so different. You do a great job of making people feel relaxed and free to experiment.”

“I thoroughly enjoyed your course and would like to thank you for making it informative, fun and productive. My husband was very impressed with my work and so two pieces will be framed as a permanent reminder.”

Another Helfa Gelf Art Trail has come and gone. More new faces in the studio as well as some familiar ones. I was surprised to hear from one of my visitors on the last Saturday, that an article on Helfa Gelf and photographs of a number of the participating artists, including me, was on the BBC Wales news! I had to look it up. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-41366467

I made monoprints while Helfa Gelf was on, this time using Everlasting Sweet Pea, Horsetail and Bindweed. Horsetail and Bindweed are not welcome in the garden but they make great prints!