A Stitch Drawn Workshop with Richard McVetis

For this masterclass, Richard McVetis has drawn on his love of stitching, and paying attention to time and labour. Participants will explore a combination of traditional hand embroidery techniques, how you do it and why you do it. We will explore the slowness and rhythms of hand stitching: the versatility and strengths of embroidery for drawing and mark-making.

Create textures and patterns, work a stitch in different threads changing its scale and spacing, work freely, and combine stitches to mark make and draw. Practical help will be given by demonstrating the many ways in which this can be achieved using the most simple of hand embroidery techniques, no knowledge of particular and precise embroidery techniques are needed.

Good ideas need well and nourished minds; this workshop inspires moments of mindfulness and conditions for creativity to pause, think and re-energise.

What participants need to join in the workshop:

Please feel free to bring your own fabric, sewing needles, a range of embroidery threads, embroidery hoop etc if you have them. If not, we have some spare!

About your tutor

Richard McVetis is a British artist/maker known for his meticulously embroidered drawings and sculptures. His artistic practice centres on his training as an embroiderer through traditional hand stitch techniques and mark making. Using laboured and meticulously worked wools and multiples of embroidered dots and crosses, he explores the similarities between pen on paper and thread on fabric, employing a limited vocabulary of mark-making and deliberately subdued colour to create a binary simplicity.The mapping of space and marking Time and form are central themes. Using a range of media, McVetis explores how Time and place, experienced and constructed. Ideas are often developed in response to or created specifically to a moment, visualising and making this a tactile and tangible object. Recent explorations of the cube and grid format are an attempt to organise, control and rationalise the infiniteness of Time. Structures, motifs and patterns reference the urban landscape; they introduce the idea of Time as architecture and how our lives are built and housed in a construct of Time. Finalist of the 2018 Loewe Craft Prize, Richard McVetis is one of the leading contemporary hand embroidery artists in the UK today. His artwork is celebrated in galleries, art fairs, and museums across the world.McVetis is a graduate of the Royal College of Art in 2008; he lives and works in London.

Course Booking Terms and Conditions

Workshop and course bookings can be cancelled and refunded up until 7 days before the scheduled start date. As materials and equipment are ordered in advance, we regret that refunds cannot be offered less than 7 days before the workshop date. Please note that Eventbrite’s booking fee is non-refundable.If we need to cancel the course for any reason your ticket will be fully refunded.

Covid-19

This workshop is due to take place once Covid restrictions have been lifted. We will be monitoring government guidance for any changes. Please do what makes you and others around you comfortable.