May exhibition - Hidden Worlds by Saima Kaur and Jo Butler

Tuesday 26th April - Saturday 21st May 2022

Embroidery and paintings exploring untold stories, by local artists Saima and Jo

Our next exhibition will be a mixed media exploration of untold and personal stories by two local artists, featuring hand embroidery and paintings.

Saima Kaur, Tutor Tales, (work in progress) 2019. 2m x 2m (6’6″ x 6’6″). Hand embroidery on cotton.

Saima is an artist and educator specialising in Indian hand embroidery. She has a background in Museum Studies and worked in the arts and museums sector before starting her career as an artist. She now runs a range of community hand embroidery workshops, delivers talks and workshops on Phulkaris, and creates her own artwork inspired by this textile tradition.

Saima says, “Embroidery truly captured my imagination in my mid-thirties while at home with my children. I found it to be an intuitive, intimate and transformative medium. It allowed me to create something that was just mine. And it gave me the space to slowly express my imagination and build texture and design in the simplest way possible.”

“My work has evolved from being pretty compositions with birds, to figurative works, and then to pieces that include text, humour and a touch of the surreal.”

Jo is a mixed media and textile artist, who works with textiles, collage, paint, and drawing materials. Her choice of medium is often related to her physical disability; she has Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and experiences high levels of pain. She uses art as one tool in her pain management kit, and her work often reflects this struggle.

She says that, “Creating art keeps me going, supports my mental health, and gives structure to my day.”

“I only really started to explore art in 2019 so I’m very early in my artistic journey. I’m inspired by a variety of subjects; recently I’ve been focusing on my interaction with the world and exploring my thoughts around my disability. I enjoy the process of making and developing different marks that help to investigate and explain the impact of pain, both physically and mentally.”

The exhibition will feature pieces from both artists, Saima’s element will be a series of stories about Indian and Pakistani women that she has met and learnt about over the years, and Jo’s will explore her relationship to her disability, and the impact it has on her daily life.