Black Swan Arts Exhibition Archives 2024

Short summary

The Palestinian History Tapestry illustrates the history of the land of Palestine from Neolithic times to the present. It has been made by Palestinian women within and outside Palestine, many of whom live in refugee camps across the Middle East. It draws attention to the history and the heritage of the people of Palestine and their internationally confirmed right to return to the homes from which they were expelled in 1948. The Tapestry is likely to be the largest collection of illustrative work ever produced by Palestinian embroiderers. The Tapestry is an expression of Palestinian “sumud” (steadfastness) and solidarity.

More information

The award-winning Palestinian History Tapestry uses the embroidery skills of Palestinian women to illustrate aspects of the land and peoples of Palestine – from Neolithic times to the present. In the past, Palestinian embroiderers have mainly used cross stitch (tatreez) and geometric designs to decorate dresses and other items.

Although some of these designs have been used in parts of the Palestinian History Tapestry, the Tapestry is a further development of traditional Palestinian embroidery.  It shows how the creativity and imagination of Palestinian embroiderers has been used to represent the complicated illustrative imagery required for a history tapestry.

The Palestinian History Tapestry was proposed in 2011 by Jan Chalmers. Jan had worked for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in Gaza and was familiar with Palestinian embroidery. She had also contributed to the creation of a 122-metre South African history tapestry stitched by village women living in poverty on the Eastern Cape of South Africa. The Keiskamma Tapestry, as it is known, illustrates 300 years of history leading to the end of apartheid, and it is now on permanent display in the Parliament House in Cape Town.

Jan’s proposal for a Palestinian history tapestry led Palestinians and friends to work together to establish and develop the Palestinian History Tapestry Project. The work of the embroiderers has been funded by charitable donations, and from sales of Palestinian embroidery.

The first phase of the Project was completed in 2018. Formal launch events coincided with the 70th Anniversary of ‘The Nakba’ (‘The Catastrophe’) This resulted in the forcible removal of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, and the creation of the State of Israel.

The Tapestry was launched in London on 11 December, the day on which, in 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted resolution 194. This resolved that:
“Refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and [that] compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to.”

One of the largest contemporary art exhibitions in the South West is now on show at Black Swan Arts in Frome – the biennial Art Open.

This exhibition has been judged and curated by an extraordinary and committed team of art professionals, representing some of the country’s most progressive art institutions, under the leadership of curator Lucy Gundry. 

Fine art, sculpture, ceramics, textiles, photography and digital media are all represented, with every piece for sale at under £1,000 to encourage collectors and first-time buyers to snap up works they love and investments for the future.

Comments from early visitors:

Fabulous collection and selection of art. 

Absolutely fantastic!

Another superb show. 

Mind and eye-boggling – well done.

From over 800 submissions from around the UK, just 178 have been selected for the exhibition by the independent panel of judges:

Harry Judge
Alice Kettle
Sarah Bourghardt

Each year we have a new panel of independent judges who are not part of the Black Swan Arts Programming Group or its Board of Trustees. This helps to guarantee an unbiased and varied selection.

Prizes awarded this year:

First Prize sponsored by Hauser & Wirth – £1500
Lynda Pelly Prize for an artist under the age of 30 – £500
Photography Prize sponsored by Harris & Harris – £250

Local Artist Prize sponsored by Bistro Lottie
BSA Solo Show sponsored by Black Swan Arts
Emerging Maker Prize sponsored by The Makers Yard – one year network membership.

Throughout the run of the show a series of artist residencies will be taking place in the neighbouring Frome Museum, featuring artists whose work appears in the exhibition.

An exhibition of textiles and embroidery by SWISH, Somerset, and Wiltshire Independent Stitch Hub, formerly Frome and District Embroiderers Guild.

Meetings take place on the second Saturday of the month in Christchurch Hall on Park Road Frome, where Members can attend workshops taught by external and internal tutors, on a variety subjects.

SWISH is a very friendly group, always willing to share knowledge.

New members are always welcome.

Come and speak to the members stewarding the exhibition for more information or look on the website. Swish-stitch.weebly.com.

Lizbeth Spurgeon produces images from memory of places and imagination. These give a mind’s eye view of the natural world around us.

They are often landscapes worked with the movement of ever changing skies. Some may be seen as familiar places, and the viewer will often give their own interpretation of the paintings. Paintings are produced on canvas or wood blocks using some mixed mediums and oil paint.

Gerard Woodward explores and celebrates the local landscape using oil on canvas

Suzanne Woodward explores various narratives based on experience and imagination using water based mixed media on recycled paper. She lives and works in Frome, Somerset

Eva Goddard is a local artist inspired by flowers and nature. This exhibition is a merging of her paintings and textile designs, using a number of techniques and styles in various mediums.

Jennie Gilling
Plant forms are developed from sunshine for Jennie’s cyanotypes, a process she has explored for 24 years, revealing what the eye can miss.

Stoney Parsons
Evocative contemporary abstract landscapes inspired by the local countryside, capturing the feeling of the land. Acrylic on canvas.

Liza Saunders
Liza Saunders is an artist and designer based in Frome. Her love of colour and imagery is evident in her fine art silk screen prints.

Nicola Clark
Colourful acrylic paintings and collages on themes of Celtic and Shamanic legend. Cards and prints available.

“Juvenilia, Anarchism, life in bohemian Barcelona, the gangs of Hackney, Córdoba and up to present day Frome, Chris Pig, a genre artist has kept an autobiography through the medium of printmaking.

He has been an artist printmaker for over 40 years. After studying his MA in Barcelona with Winchester School of Art, he became principal lecturer in Printmaking at City and Islington College for seven years. He left to set up his own studio in Córdoba where he lived for six years before returning to London and working at East London Printmakers. He now lives in Frome with his family where he is director of Black Pig Printmaking Studio.

He has work in public and private collections throughout the world such as Guangdong Museum of Art China, Douro Museum of Printmaking Portugal, Ashmolean Museum Oxford ,the Pallant House Gallery, Chichester ,  the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum in London”

Frome Pride 2024 present their Pride Across Generations Exhibition showcasing the diverse and profound talents of local LGBTQIA+ Artists & Allies.

The exhibition celebrates our community across the generations from those who built it, to those who live, benefit and defend it today.

Including powerful & arresting works by Artists Kate Talbot, Boyce da Potter and Luke Carter exploring the impact of the AIDS crisis and its continuing affects.

Visitors will enjoy pieces Inspired by subjects as wide-ranging as identity, self-expression and what it means to live and love as a queer soul in today’s society.

Artists Harriet Rose, Damian Portela-Blanco & Yssie Lycan present thought provoking and beautiful work inviting us to reflect on where we have come from and the distance left to walk.

Pride Across Generations is a quiet revolution in Frome’s progress towards being a beacon of the queer art scene and is not to be missed.

Frome Art Society (FAS) will be continuing their long-established partnership with Black Swan Arts this April, with their Spring 2024 Exhibition at the Black Swan’s Long Gallery. The Vera Skinner prize, named after one of the society’s founders, will be judged this year by local artist, Stoney Parsons. Visitors can look forward to an exuberant and diverse display of work to delight and surprise. Do come along.

Showing every day from 20^th April to 6^th May 10am to 4pm.

FAS is a vibrant and friendly society for all artists in the wider Frome area. It  welcomes artists at all stages of their creative journeys and who work across all genres. Exhibitions are part of an annual programme of talks, demonstrations, workshops and outdoor painting days in which participating artists have the chance to share information, ideas and artwork.

Linda spent her childhood in Glastonbury, Somerset where she first developed her love of nature and the countryside. She started painting in 1980 whilst living in Billericay, Essex and although she had no formal art training she soon had work accepted for exhibition at the Guildhall and Mall Galleries in London.

Linda specialises in detailed flower studies with an abstract background of colour, and these paintings are very much influenced by the changing moods and atmospheres of the beautiful Dorset countryside and the many wild flowers that grow there in abundance. She also paints landscapes, butterfly and moth studies, miniatures and cards.

Ruth Broadway is a multi-media artist based in Bristol. Ruth’s work captures things at the cusp of change – a moon, a moth, a girl, a woman, the tide. Ruth uses the physical acts of stitching, dyeing, printing, collecting and preserving to tether the ephemeral. This exhibition shows how the rituals of daily noticing, recording and making can foster appreciation of the quiet transformation happening around us. Inspired by traditional folk craft, Ruth embraces the prosaic nature of these techniques to create work that becomes love-letters to the passing of time, transformation and the fragility of life. Folktales – especially ones where the unexceptional hero must overcome apparently impossible obstacles (spinning straw into gold, silently weaving barbed shirts for seven cursed brothers, finding the way home by following bread crumbs and so on) – are a ceaseless source of inspiration and can be seen in the repetitive techniques Ruth uses. She is drawn to stories of transformation, whether physical or metaphorical; dramatic and magical or slow and ordinary.

“My work is a walk through the (deep dark) woods even when you find yourself in the city. I like to discover forgotten and disregarded things; a moulted feather, a lip-stick blot, fingerprints on a mirror. To me these found things that have been cast off become an opportunity to tenderly work subtle interventions and try to tell their stories.

My work is influenced by nature and the marks we leave behind and attempting to preserve both. I find myself trying to straddle the gap between human control and ordering of data, formation and display and letting nature, the elements, life cycles and time take the lead – adapting my materials according – and in response to – a situation or object as I find it. I seek to retain and catch a transient moment, thing or memory and hold it forever.” 

The Contemporary Glass Society (CGS) is delighted to be collaborating with Black Swan Arts in Frome, Somerset in the launch of a new open-to-all members exhibition in the Centre’s Long Gallery. The exhibition runs from Friday, 19th January to Sunday, 25th February 2024 with a special event – “Meet the Makers” from 2pm on Saturday 20^th January 2024.

The Contemporary Glass Society is the premiere supporter and promoter of contemporary glass art and glass artists within the UK.  Membership is open to glass artists at all stages of their careers, collectors and members of the general public interested in contemporary glass.
The exhibition features the work of 37 CGS glass artists at all stages of their career with an emphasis on CGS South West and Midlands members. The exhibition shows the dazzling delight of glass in all its facets of light, colour and technique. It is a true celebration of the diversity of contemporary glass.

All work is for sale and features an array of both plinth and wall mounted artworks. So come along and feel your spirits lift in delight as you step into an environment of beauty, colour and glass glory!

Artists taking part;
Yiran An, Emma Baker, Tulin Bedri, Peter Berry, P.J. Buchanan, Madeline Bunyan, Sue Burne, Teresa Chlapowski, Julie Coakley, Beth Colledge, Stevie Davies, Dalia Doron, Shirley Eccles, Rachel Elliott, Hannah Gibson, Jianyong Guo,  Claire Hall, Joe Harrington, Oliver Hanney, Nick Hasell, Kate Henderson, Ali Jarvis, Wendy Jeavons, Sheenagh McKinlay, Wendy Newhofer, Jade Pinnell, Stacey Poultney, Susan Purser Hope, Anna Laura Quintana, Morag Reekie, Donna Richardson, Hadia Roushdy, Bailey Shooter, Sue Sinclair, Alison Vincent, Frans Wesselman, Jane Yarnall.