Home - Di Terry & Emilie Taylor

16 October - 20 November

Poetry Reading with Fay Musselwhite:
Thursday 18 November 7:30-9:30pm -

hospitality provided.

Emilie Taylor makes pots about the ‘Urban Edgelands’ around her home city of Sheffield. Di Terry uses paint and printmaking in an ongoing dialogue with the rural landscape around her Oldham studio.

Home is a show about place. It is about how where you live gets under your skin, and how through returning to craft processes and the rhythm of making we can achieve a greater understanding of who we are. This exhibition gives insight into both artists process in their ongoing dialogue with the landscape and where they live.

“Emilie Taylor is best known for making large scale vessels depicting contemporary urban scenes focussing on representing people’s ideas and experiences of the places they inhabit authentically. As a painter myself I know how the physical act of making allows you to lose yourself in your work, which in turn shows you a side of yourself unseen to others and often unknown to you. I believe this is what Emilie means when she says she believe the process of making can achieve a greater understanding of who we are.” Karen Sherwood, Director.

Di Terry makes work inspired by her rural location. There is a connection with Emilie Taylor’s work both with the lived experience of your area and in the multi layered approach to image making. Di uses collage, mixed media and monoprint to make semi abstract prints which make up the majority of her work for this exhibition.

Emilie Taylor is exhibiting several ceramic pieces alongside monoprints with mixed media, featuring figures, which often reference old English folk traditions. Both artists are expressing their connection with the places they live and work through process but each has their own unique voice. Emilie’s focus is on the people who inhabit her urban environment, whereas Di’s focus is the rural environs.

The poem ‘Home’ by Fay Musselwhite is part of the exhibition.

Home

While forest furs the earth, a subterrain
shrugged from shrubbery and trees
mulches over land’s rock-bones,
our lungs unpleat and iron streams our veins.

When we mud the weave of sapling-split
and thicket twig to flesh a hut’s wattled ribs,
deeper sleep, kept from the prowl of beasts
and sky’s biting wrath, lets ideas connect.

Dwelling in earthen vessels tethers us
to a plot: scuff of clag and clod, or crag.
We muscle in on worm and fungus work,
learn its heft, its murk, lug logs and rock,
and like a roped goat yearns, we spiral out
from our foot-hold in the dirt.

Subsisting on our wits, we sow and reap,
stack hay, brew and bake, forge iron, fire clay,
stow a part harvest against darkest days.
For praise we borrow songs from birds, and rail
at feather, claw or weather that thwart our toil.
We carve our croft, begin to sculpt the land.

Smallholdings unfold like mountain flowers,
our settlement with soil presses on
as seasons turn in untold thousands.

Then fences swagger in to hammer home
the stakes now held in softer palms.
And after crofters’ rent is invented
our belly hollows grow till we’re starved
off our farms and all we’ve known.

Rootless as currency, we follow
the grind down the harnessed river
to a town in spate: our houses crowd
like blackening clouds. Hand to mouth,
we dip our heads, scrape the pot, and serve
the birth of industry before we rise,
squaring up to shoulder the sky
in towers of iron and glaze.

There’s common ground up here but not
enough to till, or graze a herd or flock.
It’s said the land we claimed way back
is owned and not by us: to eat we shop,
risk a broken mind or neck for dust, or beg.

Over-clumped, still underfed,
roughing it in rust bitten profit stacks –
offered mould slathered flats, we suck it up.
A sofa’s neither home nor bed –
beats a cave of paving slab.

The green shoots you hear of
yield a token crop that’s pushing us
under the knee or cosh of who we once
trusted to share the land’s stock,
who let flames ransack our block
and strange fruit with severed roots
suffocate on streets, or packed
as traded loot in backs of vans.

Containers for a rage that continues
to contain us, ladles out shame
that deranges and divides us, yet
still we raise our bellies to the sun,
rail, praise, age, rant, rave, and again
nestled bean-snug in the lawless terrain
of a human kiln, someone begins...

Golden fragile strong – we are vessels
pulled from mud, iron in our blood,
for the everlasting dance, we sing
our song to the howling wind.

Fay Musselwhite