Michael Brennand-Wood

       As part of my work placement today, I had to gather a collection of exhibition references and interviews with the artist Michael Brennand-Wood, in preparation for a new exhibition. This is going to be a new exhibition, Wood's first solo show in the East of England.

Notes from research...

http://www.themaking.org.uk/Content/makers/2011/02/michael_brennand_wood.html   - interview with Michael Brennand-Wood

 

What first attracted you to working with textiles?

 As I child I spent a lot of time playing with textiles. My grandmother was an industrial weaver who worked in a mill in the north of England and as a small boy I used to play with fabrics she bought home. She also taught me to knit and sew and do a little embroidery. Her brother had a little loom at home and the noise and smell of the loom is a strong childhood memory.

 

Most of your pieces are supported on a wooden base, were you interested in woodwork and sculpture from an early age as well?

 Yes, my grandfather was an engineer and he had a shed at the bottom of the garden where he made things in wood and metal. He was an old-fashioned craftsman who really enjoyed making. So my two grandparents were responsible for my interest in the two materials that are primal to my work – wood and textiles.

 

So what made you decide to study textiles rather than go down the sculpture/fine art line at university?

 I was going to study fine art but when I showed people my folder it was full of textiles and I think they were a bit put off. When I went round the corner to the textiles department I felt much more at home and decided to stay there. But I studied embroidery as it was far the most open-ended area of textiles and the area closest to fine art as I saw stitching as drawing in thread.  

 

What was it like studying textiles as a man in the late 60s, early 70s?

 Before I started I had no idea that textiles were a ‘female’ craft, they were just something that was always around and you could use to make things. But when I did my degree in textiles I was the only man among 30 odd women – it was beyond unusual, especially as irony hadn’t really been invented. I think I was quite brave! My work has always been about putting myself in unfamiliar territory and working in the margins and I think as a man working in a ‘female’ area I was doing just that. My tutors didn’t know what to do with me, but it meant I had to work really hard as anything the women did I wanted to do better. What was interesting was that my skill base was quite different from the girls as at school there had been some degree of segregation with the boys doing woodwork and the girls cookery, so I could bring different skills into my work. Also my approach was quite different. I was quite philosophical about why I was doing things and not just interested in doing them well and stitching onto fabric. My work was always about ideas and not just technique.

 

When you left Manchester how did you want to develop your work?

 I wanted to release the stitch from the background and separate it from the historical. The great thing about a traditional art school education was that you got an excellent grounding in techniques and the history of textiles and so I wanted to build on that and work on how you could adapt and extend the techniques. I liked the geometry of the stitch and wanted to work out a new way to do it and experiment with new materials. Textiles in the 1960s were all about decorative stitching on fabric and I wanted to push against that.

 

Your work is very sculptural, does relief play an important part in your work?

 I think one of the strongest characteristics of my work is the illusion of space. I’m interested in exploring the space between the second and third dimension. Touch is also hugely important, and is all part of the nature of textiles – you can experience them a bit like Braille. It’s a sensory experience with the materials conveying a message through touch.

 

How important is meaning in your work?

The work can be read on several levels and I like the interplay between the micro and macro readings of the work. From a distance it looks purely decorative, but as you get closer you can see the details and understand it on a different level. I like the idea of going into the work, there’s almost a hallucinogenic quality to some of my recent pieces – you enter a different world. I’m interested in abstraction and enjoy seeing what you can do optically with rhythm and colour, but the abstraction still has a meaning and is not just playing with pattern. I hope my work makes people think. It’s very rich and you can go into to it and get a lot out of it over a long time.

 

How do you convey the meanings behind your works?

 I use titles as clues to help explain the meaning of the pieces and most of the time people do get it. I’m also very interested in the nature of materials and the meanings they convey – they all have a message. For example, at the moment I am doing a series of flag-based pieces which are all about associations of war and conflict and the euphemisms people use when they talk about these issues. They’re not anti-war with a capital A and W, but they are linked to the madness in the Middle East and the great sadness I feel about putting our young people into the positions that we do. Flags are very emotional and very loaded icons. My floral pieces are also full of meaning. The biggest mistake you could make is to think they are just quite pretty as they have a darker underbelly, a bit like the Venus flytrap flower or flowers at a funeral. I’m interested in the way historical textiles have lots of resonance and were used to mark important stages in life like birth and death.

 

Is making an important part of your practice?

 For me making is the thinking process. Nowadays making is considered dinosaur-ish, but I make all my own work and that’s very important for me. I do work with digital technology and use computerised machine embroidery to make the individual blooms found in my floral pieces and I don’t have a problem with that, although I would if I did it all the time. My first joint show was at the Crafts Council in 1979 and I feel I was part of that generation of makers encouraged by the Crafts Council and I don’t want to turn my back on that making heritage.

 

 How would you say your work has developed over your career?

 I think my work can roughly be divided into four stages. The first stage, up to the mid-80s, was dominated by embroidery, and then from the mid-80s to the early 90s I spent a lot of time working with pattern. During the 90s I became fascinated by lace, particularly the idea of reinventing it from a male perspective. And after 2001 I started working with traditions of floral textiles. I like my work to change and evolve rather that re-working the same pieces over and over again. With my lace pieces I was pushing both myself and my audience – people would say, ‘why are you doing these things, we liked your old work’, but then they began to get used to the new pieces and appreciate them more. I think it’s important to have a body of ideas which you continually try to extend and develop.  I’ve always being interested in working in contested areas. Pattern in 80s was very unfashionable and people couldn’t understand why I was working in it, and the same went for my more recent work with floral and historical textiles. I think it’s really exciting for artists to put themselves in unfamiliar territory, push things ahead and ask questions. Projects, commissions and exhibitions are all a form of continuous education.

 

 

http://lostinlace.org.uk/artists/michael-brennand-wood - Interview with Michael Brennand-Wood on ‘Lace the Final Frountier’

 

Michael Brennand-Wood - UK

The artist reveals...how lace is significant to their work
 “I first made lace in or around 1973, bobbin lace followed by a short spell working on an industrial machine in Nottingham. I loved the diagrammatic, schematic linear designs that a lace maker worked from. They reminded me of graphic contemporary music scores”.

...the ideas behind the work
“ My intention is to construct a ‘military lace’ emblematic of conflict and the annexing of resources and territory. Imagery for the roundels is drawn from three sources; lace, weaponry, and the Rorschach test. The visual field of the work echoes the instructional, pricked, diagrammatic papers on which bobbin laces are constructed – in this case a fusion of Islamic and Western geometry”.

 

 

 

 

http://dovecotstudios.com/whats-on/event/20/forever-changes-michael-brennand-wood - Dovecot Studios 2012/13 ‘Forever Changes’.

 

Forever Changes: Michael Brennand-Wood

An explosion of colour, textiles, shape and form will greet visitors to Dovecot Studios when a major retrospective exhibition of work by Michael Brennand-Wood opens for a christmas run. Forever Changes runs from the 7 December through until 12 January 2013.

Michael Brennand-Wood is internationally regarded as one of the most innovative and inspiring artists working in textiles. He makes elaborate, eye-catching wall-hung pieces that are part sculpture, part textile. Covered in an intriguing variety of materials ranging from conventional textiles to flags, CDs and badges, the pieces have elaborate visual patterns masking more profound meanings. He has persistently worked within contested areas of textile practice, embroidery, pattern, lace and floral imagery.

Born in Lancashire in the 50s, Brennand-Wood completed an art foundation course at Bolton College of Art and Design. Choosing to do a BA (Hons) in textiles at Manchester Polytechnic has since been described as “heroic” as he was the only man on the course. This choice was not too surprising when you discover that Brennand-Wood’s grandmother was an industrial weaver who taught the young Michael to sew and knit. With an engineer as a grandfather, you begin to understand the influence of structure and softness on his formative years. On completing his BA, Brennand-Wood continued to specialise in embroidery. It was the area of textiles least rooted in function and he wanted to extend the discipline by drawing in three dimensions with the linear use of thread.

Forever Changes features many previously unseen, new and important works with the emphasis very firmly on the ideas behind each piece. The exhibition will include works from the past 40 years including installation, sculptural, relief, studio and commission works. The collection of work chosen represents the significant moments spanning his artistic life – a visual biography of Brennand-Wood’s career to date.

Brennand-Wood’s floral phase of work is one of his most recognisable of his career. Textiles are heavily influenced by flowers from the Islamic through to William Morris. Crystallized Movements, constructed in 2004, is an array of beautiful coloured flowers set against a backdrop of white painted soldiers, a killing field of humans – puppets in the theatre of war. Such elegance layered with disturbing messages is a Brennand-Wood signature.

Examples of Michael Brennand-Wood’s ’s work can be seen in major public, corporate and private collections worldwide including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa and National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. He was appointed Visiting Professor at Manchester Metropolitan University in 2005 and is Research Fellow at the University of Ulster.

Forever Changes is originated by Ruthin Craft Centre and curated by June Hill and now adapted to show in Dovecot’s South Gallery. It will be accompanied by a fully illustrated publication which will present a biography of the work, exhibitions, events, places and concepts that have shaped Brennand-Wood’s practice.

 

 

 

http://jessicahemmings.com/index.php/michael-brennand-wood-ruthin-craft-centre-wales/           -   ‘Forever Changes’ exhibition review. (Selvedge Magazine).

 

Michael Brennand-Wood: “Forever Changes”

September 22 – November 25, 2012

 Ruthin Craft Centre, Wales

 

Michael Brennand-Wood is as prodigious a collector of things, as he is keeper of his own record. His overriding visual preoccupation is with the surface pattern and dimension of textiles. This means he makes textiles in their own right; but as often as not the textile also becomes something else – wood or plastic sculptures, the photographic image. A seemingly encyclopaedic knowledge and collection of music, fabric and ephemera fuel the four decades of work on display here. During this time Brennand-Wood’s output has consistently searched for new ways of seeing and treating the textile as well as alternative contexts for our understanding of materials such as wood and cloth that are traditionally captured under the broad and unwieldy umbrella of craft.

To accompany this extensive exhibition June Hill, the exhibition’s curator, has edited a sizable illustrated catalogue that captures all but the very latest investigations included in the exhibition. As she reveals in her introduction: “That his work should enter a new phase during the gestation period of the project only emphasised the difficulties of encapsulating a career which refuses to be contained by the boundaries of experimentation.”

Brennand-Wood’s taste is not for everyone. Visual clichés often provide stimulus for interrogation. For example, late in this show “Restored and Remixed” (2012), an embroidery on found carpet appears, visually suggestive of “Pac Man meets the Hindu Kush”. Plastic toys, lace and real flower petals enjoy equal attention in his aesthetic hierarchy. Scale is often large and there is often a clear relationship to the wall apparent. Both gestures seem to reject associations with the domestic and instead strive to see the decorative as part of a lineage of visual art. Wall fixed sculptures such as “Holding Pattern” (2007) and “Babel” (2008) can be seen as exemplifying this move; pattern explodes from what was once a two dimensional reference in an optical game of find-the-focal-point.

It is impossible to ignore the web of debates around gender and material that are a part of Brennand-Wood’s career. Without labouring the point, he is a rare male voice in contemporary textile practice. These distinctions should not colour our primary response to the work, but they are important enough to not avoid, even if voicing such observations risks a return to territory many see as tired. (It is interesting to note that his four catalogue essayists are men, potentially a gesture to avoid attention sticking on the point of gender.)

Perhaps more comfortable, but no less resolved, are debates around the disciplinary allegiances and alienations of craft and art. These boundaries are far more policed than the current interdisciplinary moment may want to acknowledge and Brennand-Wood’s career shows the institutional and critical confusion that emerges from creative practice that finds no comfort in disciplinary boxes. While he studied embroidery at what was then Manchester Polytechnic, graduating in 1975, but he offers us embroidery that refuses to operate in familiar ways. His work is too knowing of art history to fit comfortably into the sloppy craft movement; too serious in its engagement with international events (in particular the senselessness of war) to be treated as purely decorative.

After the show loops through Ruthin’s galleries, viewers face a self contained room that encloses his newest experiments. In a recent gallery talk, I heard the artist speak of this work as an antidote to his catalogue writing – a moment when he returned to the realm of an intuitive visual vocabulary. Populated by space age creatures, this work is all the stranger for the absence of contextualisation currently too early to provide. The inclusion of this discrete space within what otherwise operates as a cohesive retrospective is as revealing as all the careful analysis, explanation and reflection that accompanies his earlier work. Creativity is unpredictable and as Brennand-Wood explains in the exhibition catalogue, the latest work offers an “approximation of territory glimpsed, remembered but not yet fully explored.”

This exhibition is the first to occupy all three galleries at the Craft Centre in one fell swoop and it does so comfortably. While the Crafts Centre is regularly commended for the professional quality of its exhibitions, this acknowledgement deserves whole-heartedly repeating once again. Michael Brennand-Wood is an artist whose instinct to translate thought and emotion into material is an endless source of inspiration. Based on the evidence of this handsomely conceived show, I imagine he will continue to follow instincts both explicable and inexplicable regardless of current trends in thought or material.

Selvedge Magazine (issue 51: 88)

 

 

 

http://www.nga.gov.au/exhibition/Transformations/Detail.cfm?IRN=142927 – article about the meaning behind one of his pieces.

 

Michael BRENNAND-WOOD | Died pretty- Flag of convenience 

Died pretty- Flag of convenience  2005 

Textile

embroidered flowers, acrylic, toy soldiers, wire, paint tubes, fabric, resin on wood panel

asemblage, collage and computerised machine embroidery

The power of pattern to encode tradition and encapsulate cultural interaction has long been the subject of research and interpretation for Michael Brennand-Wood. A parallel interest in music and eclectic taste, running from John Cage to Buck Owens, has influenced his approach to the building of textile constructions in which variations on familiar forms reverberate in counterpoint and random geometry. In Died pretty – flag of convenience Brennand-Wood has chosen the universal image of the flower, a carpet-like field of embroidered blossoms and petals strewn over an underlayer of plastic soldiers. Here remembrance is given physical form, evoking killing fields from history to the present and their regeneration that fuels hope and continuity. Brennand-Wood avoids saccharine sentiment by using machine embroidery, which links us to the world of industry and production that stretches from Jacquard’s loom charts of the eighteenth century to today’s computerised sewing machines, their implications for labour and exploitation lying beneath his iconography of nature.

 

 

 

http://whitworthstudiothinking.wordpress.com/2014/03/19/michael-brennand-wood-textile-artist/ - Interview with Michael Brennand-Wood on the use of his studio space.

 

In preparation for the opening of the Clore Studio at the Whitworth Art Gallery this year, the Whitworth’s learning team are investigating how different artists in the collection use their studio spaces.

Michael Brennand-Wood is an internationally acclaimed textile artist whose work has been exhibited across the globe and features both in the Whitworth’s collection and our Tactile Textile educational resource. Brennand-Wood is known for his original use of traditional textile techniques and motifs, for example using floral embroidery processes to produce three dimensional mixed media pieces.

Below Michael answers some questions about how he uses his studio, focusing in particular on the impact that physical space has on his art works.

 

1.     How often do you use your studio? And how long have you been based there?

It depends on my schedule but on average 5-6 days a week. I do try to be there, most days and if not, I work in my studio at home. The studio I rent, I’ve had since 1994.

 

2.     How do you organise your studio? Are you methodical in the layout of your materials and equipment, or is practicality necessary in a creative space?

The problem with studios is storing either materials or finished artwork. I have a storage facility to house completed works in. I have a working studio area that enables a long view to see semi-completed work on a wall. Materials are stored in plastic boxes in order, paint and fabric in cupboards.

 

3.     Does your studio influence your practice? Or vice versa?

I’ve always found that residencies affect the work more through physical working space than locality. A good studio definitely imparts a positive vibe! It’s my creative home a private place to do whatever I please.

 

4.     Is your studio somewhere you go to feel inspired? Or are you inspired elsewhere and use your studio to respond to the inspiration?

Yes the studios inspiring, I am someone who believes in the importance of thinking through making, it’s therefore important I’m around the building blocks of creativity. Other places obviously inspire but the studio funnels and synthesises those experiences into a creative reality.

 

5.     Is your studio a place where you are experimental with your work? Or is your work in the studio where you produce a finalised idea?

I’m very experimental; I don’t much care for signature pieces. I’m an explorer of visual territories, it’s important for me to put myself at a creative risk. The studio is therefore the laboratory where things happen and ideas are processed.

 

6.     Do you share your studio with anyone else, and does this influence your work there?

No and I wouldn’t.

 

7.     Is your studio a reflective and intimate space? Or a social and productive space?

The studio is a productive, reflective and working, intimate space. It’s only ever social when a friend or client visits.

 

8.     Is your perception of your work the same in the confines of the studio as it is outside it?

No work changes in relation to space, exhibition venues impart their own influences as to how a work is approached. Work outside the studio can appear very different, as you remove the real time continuum. Works can be shown alongside pieces that were made early or later. Unexpected relationships occur and you can find, new connections and starting points.

 

 

 

http://www.educationartprize.com/2012/michaelbrennand-wood - Article on Michael Brennand-Wood, including artistic influences.

 

Michael Brennand-Wood

Michael is internationally regarded as one of the most innovative and inspiring textile artists creating work today, and he is also highly praised for his work as a curator and lecturer. His pieces hang in both private and public collections all over the world, from Somerset to Kyoto.

Michael’s artistic influences include Paul Klee, Jasper Johns, Alberto Burri and Antoni Tapies but he cites Robert Rauschenberg and Paul Klee as two of his all-time favourites, particularly for their exploratory use of media and fusion of textile elements. Research these fascinating artists to gain an insight into Michael’s work!

Having spent much of his childhood playing with textiles, metal and wood thanks to his very traditionally creative grandparents, a weaver and engineer, Michael could knit, sew and embroider by his early teens. He chose to study textiles during the late sixties and early seventies, finding himself to be the only man in a department of women. Collectively this appears to have given Michael a freedom with textiles he used the thorough grounding in techniques and the history of textiles to break the mould, experimenting with stitch and fabric.

He uses all sorts of media to create his spellbinding sculptures including acrylic paint, wood, metal, glass, collage, lace, toy soldiers, lay figures, pencils, computerised embroidery… Preparatory drawings are scanned and digitized to create the stitched flower badge-like elements that float across the surface of the works.

Michael has explored and developed his own techniques inventing many new and imaginative ways of integrating textiles with other media.

 

Lace - Inlaid fabric into painted wood ground inspired by study of historical lace fabrics

Floral Pieces - Photographic & machine embroidered /mixed media constructions inspired by study of floral patterning throughout history

Military works – Constructed mixed media pieces which refer to conflict and military insignia.

Patterned works - Mixed media assemblages of wood, fabric, acrylic & collage inspired by study of patterning in textiles & architecture

Meshes  - Layered collage, thread, acrylic paint & wood constructions which explore depth, translucency & structure.

 

Michael loves music and never creates without it. His work is highly influenced by music and a lot of his artworks contain references or quotes derived from particular songs or pieces.