Vivien Atkinson

  The inspiration for my work in Melbourne for Radiant Pavilion came from a Chinese proverb: An invisible thread connects those who are destined to meet, regardless of time, place or circumstance.  The thread may stretch or tangle, but will never break. I was...

With the CODA work packed up and now (I guess) on the way to Apeldoorn it seems like a good time to look back on this part of the HandShake project. All the 'bracelets' packed in their cotton bags I’ve had a lot of fun investigating ideas that came up in response to...

Looking at the use of knitting in relation to war has revealed some other really interesting connections.  I have to thank my son for the first discovery – he was listening to a history podcast in the background and caught the words knitting and espionage.  Strange...

Social history has provided me with a rich source of ideas and material for making work.  The rapid changes in the way we live our lives are a part of human progress, but the speed with which we embrace changing fashions and technologies sometimes comes at the cost of...

Artists using order and repetition often create works that result in large arrangements that can seem obsessive and even claustrophobic.  Lam de Wolf use of splashes of paint and the fraying of torn fabric offer the opportunity for disorder to invade the rigidity of...

One of the sessions during Roseanne Bartley’s workshop at the beginning of the year was based on the idea of using a list of verbs as the basis for working with one of the materials we had brought.  Having a list of words (materials, colours, times, actions) as the...

Susan Collis, When We Loved, 2017 Thinking about space as led me to look at some artists who make interesting use of space.  Susan Collis’s exhibition When we loved you best of all, 2017 doesn’t look like an exhibition.  The room appears vacant except for some odd...

  In my spare time (lunch is over-rated) I made a necklace that responds to the Google translation of the Dutch that described one of Lam de Wolf’s necklaces. I put the description of my necklace through the translator: Ketting gemaakt van stof bedekt trouw met...

Looking at Te Uru – the architectural space and the brief to respond to that in some way.  A starting point has been to look at a couple of different artists – Mel Bochner a conceptual artist who from the 1960’s developed a number of formats for making work one of...

February 20th, 2019 Draping venetian blind   Of course, Lam de Wolf is the first starting point – looking at the broader scope of her work and noting that much of it is closer to contemporary textile art was a definite factor in her appeal, that and the fact that...

  February 10th, 2019 Acting out the idea of the fabric brush   The HandShake 5 cohort gathered in Wellington and were treated to an interesting and stimulating Workshop conducted by Roseanne Bartley.  The first of the two exhibitions we will participate in...