Exhibition : Environmentals by Ali Ferguson 09/20/2011

Environmentals by Ali Ferguson is an exhibition of hand stitched driftwood pieces inspired by the natural environment.

ReMade 147 North High Street Musselburgh

The starting point for Environmentals is the driftwood that Ali Ferguson has collected from East Lothian beaches – some of the pieces are beautifully shaped natural wood and others can be pieces of old packing crates – whatever the sea gives up and catches her eye.

After the wood has been cleaned and dried, Ali starts assembling. This is very organic – she uses different materials, found objects, old maps – whatever calls out to her for each individual piece. She transfers images from her own photographs, mostly from the East Lothian Coast and Roslin Glen, onto the wood and then starts stitching.

Each piece grows in its own way. Ali loves the combination of the materials that she is using and the question of where all they have all come from – even the thread that she is using is vintage linen thread from beautiful wooden reels. She likes to leave a needle attached to each piece as a mark of her own input with the hand stitching – a little bit of her own history is left behind too.

As each piece is finished, the question it asks is “What Stories Could I Tell?”

Ali Ferguson trained in Textile Design at the Scottish College Of Textiles, before running her own knitwear design business for several years, producing two collections a year of women’s & children’s knitwear, many of which were sold in London.

“I love using materials and objects with a bit of history as I believe that this brings an extra dimension to the piece. I choose materials for the stories that they can tell – old letters, vintage fabrics, photographs and personal objects for example. I often build my pieces in layers – reflecting how our lives are a series of layers with everything that has gone before affecting everything that happens after. I like to think that I am “stitching stories” where each final piece has several layers of meaning.”