landbaby

Slumber, Youth and young remain.
Free from sorrow, fear and pain.
Wander not to Death’s domain....

 

We know, we know, it’s January not the 31^st October, but there’s no way we could avoid telling you about the weird, wonderful and outright sinister ‘‘The Soldier’s Rest’ . A brilliant combination of Welsh haiku poetry and embroidery, ‘Soldiers Rest’ was a very unusual piece for the Liverpool Biennial 2012 held within Landbaby itself. Whilst it’s wonderful to be have so much contact with independent artists and all you lovely customers, it’s equally great to be able to transform the shop into something interactive and engaging with the wider Liverpool creative and arts scenes. And ‘Soldiers Rest’ has allowed us the chance to do just that.

Claire Bates, the very talented owner of Landbaby created all the embroidery pieces for the exhibition herself, using some ingenious imagination deciding to embroider, not with your standard 50 pence market thread, but with human hair! In doing so, Claire really enhanced the eeriness of the accompanying poem by the well regarded & wonderful Rebecca Sharp, who you may recognise from the Whale Song piece earlier on in the year! Oh, and it's definitley worthwhile checking out Rebecca Sharp's website(http://www.rebeccajoysharp.com/ ) if not to marvel at how extremely talented she is, but to also find links to her other work and upcoming events. She is a truly inspirational writer whose work has been called "fascinatingly complex" by Neil Cooper of Herald Scotland. What more could you ask for!


Together they created a fantastic piece for the Biennial drawing together traditional elements of the ghost story and contemporary crafting. Without a shadow (or a ghost) of a doubt, the exhibition attracted some well deserved publicity with several features on the piece itself and Landbaby being produced in Liverpool’s home grown Seven Streets publications...
http://www.sevenstreets.com/liverpoolbiennial/biennial-radar-landbaby/ 
But that wasn’t all, ‘Embroidery Magazine’ published a stunning several page spread on Claire’s ingenious way of crafting, a real cherry on the cake for us at Landbaby as it meant that more people could see how wonderfully hard Claire works in making the shop beautiful .

If you missed ‘The Soldier’s Rest’ exhibition and are weeping profusely at how wonderful the show sounded or you managed to come and enjoy it during the Biennial, fear not, we have another exhibition coming your way on Saturday 26^thJanuary which will be showcasing the work of the excellent ‘Aviary’. I assure you, this is one not to be missed!  (and we'll be posting about The Aviary at a later date too, so keep a beady eye out for that).