'Telling Stories', Crawford College of Art, March 2012

Nigel Cheney

‘Telling stories’

Exhibition in the Crawford College of Art, March 2012.




Commentary on the works

Nigel Cheney’s work is rooted in embroidery in all its forms. A graduate of

Manchester Metropolitan University he has worked as a designer, artist, external examiner and lecturer, he has been the Irish selector for the Lodz tapestry triennale for the last decade. His versatility is the mixture of a full palette of textile and embroidery techniques including machine, computerised, hand stitch and digital print. His work is pictorial and delves into story telling with multi-layered references and idiomatic phrases. His recent solo exhibition ‘Gone to the Dogs’ was received to critical acclaim. He is the lecturer in embroidered textiles at The National College of Art and Design, Dublin, and has been for the past 18 years.

The body of work on show spans several recent exhibitions. The earliest piece ‘ a bird in the hand, a tribute to Johnny Cash’ dates from the 2004 Lodz Tapestry Triennale, Poland. The work reflects the emotions and images associated with particular pieces of Country music. For Cheney, Johnny Cash is a potent symbol of America. This piece is intended as a tribute to the confrontational power of his recordings, and was completed shortly after his death. The legacy of Mr. Cash’s music career is an important part of my musical heritage in his capacity as both a performer and songwriter. His Death echoed the loss of so many civilians and soldiers in recent conflicts across the world stage. The evolution of his career through a variety of styles is a constant source of stimulation for me. His last album ‘Johnny Cash, American IV: The Man Comes Around 2002’, explored themes of salvation, guilt and human frailty.  In particular his interpretation of  ‘I hung my head’ (Sting), delves into the repercussions of the use of firearms. The sheer peculiarity of the phrase ‘friendly fire’ is an issue that I have felt compelled to explore in visual terms. The title refers to the children’s saying that ‘a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush’, a treatise on valuing the present, and an obvious pun on the then American president.

The Glove as an expression of identity, uniformity and disguise has been an obsession in my work. They can protect the good by keeping the wearer from harm, but they can also be used by the bad. A symbol of guilt throughout many cultures is the red hand. It has a different political symbolism in Ulster and a common association of literally being ‘caught red handed’, or in the act of perpetrating a crime. Cheney enjoy’s the duality of images that can be read with a wry double entendre.

Colour is pivotal in Cheney’s work and this is highlighted in the companion piece ‘red carpet of grief’. This is a re-working of an earlier series of samples exploring the idea of celebrity and death in recent culture.

‘Telling stories’ was a piece produced to promote the book ‘Machine Stitch, Perspectives’, by Alice Kettle and Jane McKeating. It was the cornerstone of the 2011 group show, ‘Goldilocks and the bears’ in Dalkey with ceramicist Alex Scott, and fellow embroiderer and colleague Dr. Helen McAllister. This piece and the 2 long narratives, ‘Heartbroken (well and truly)’ and ‘The journey’ come form a body of work entitled ‘Who’s been breaking my heart?’

The central premise of this body of work explored the idea of a personal journey where choices are made that lead from innocence to experience. It employs the visual metaphors of the ‘forest’ as a place of mystery and of ‘packaging’ as a means of concealment; both are aspects of the trial and error ‘goldilocks approach’ to discovery. In addition to the imagery of the bears, the hare is a nod to the ‘white rabbit’ who sets the sense of urgency for Carroll’s Alice and the french heart shaped grave plaques act as a symbol of loss that anotate these musings. Hand drawn graphic images are layered with photgraphic images and geometric pattern to suggest the nature of memory and the dynamic between threat and comfort.

The exhibition ‘Gone to the Dogs’ is represented by 2 large, wall-hung quilts. The bold, colourful, playful images form part of the complex surfaces. They were digitally printed on Panama Cotton fabric, before being hand and machine embroidered. The textile is then sandwiched in a layer of polyester wadding and a woven, woolen tweed lining before being free machine quilted. 

In the context of the 2011 National Year of Craft, The National College of Art and Design Gallery presented a solo show by Nigel Graham Cheney. This body of work reflected upon the associations of currency value, pedigree and specualtion. In our current economic climate we see currency as something ‘not worth the paper it’s printed on’.  Our futures are gambled upon with seemingly no more care than a bet on a dog race. The intricate and complex nature of the decoration of a banknote deters forgery but how relevant is it in today’s society where substantial money is often an invisible, abstract asset that can disappear or be lent in its billions? The illustrations of dogs are intended as a humorous interpretation of the tandem worlds of both pedigree dog-shows and dog racing.

The ‘hand-made’ is an essential element in Cheney’s work. The willingness to commit to spending several hundred hours laboriously hand stitching an image is a testament to this. The simplicity of this activity and the need for patience in seeing a decision come to realisation is a slow seduction for the maker. The placement of colour and surface qualities is often intuitive and resolved through a method of trial and error, all of which are easy to imagine but hard fought for in physicality. Influences of textile design and trends in colour and surface underpin all the creative choices in realizing concepts as artifacts.

Contemporary Craft that exploits both hand operated and computer driven machinery places the work in current debates around the role of technology.  Makers have always valued their tools, as such the transition from a dye bath, or screen-printing to the use of digital printing is a natural right of passage for craft. The computerized method that allows a complex image that is made up of layers of both scans of existing objects and hours of hand rendering is the first layer in building these pieces. The contrasts of stitch qualities, which are applied in hand or controlled through a computer are also factors in the choice of methods to produce the work. The necessity is the multiprocessing of cloth through craft means to produce this artistic work. The skill in controlling a domestic sewing machine and using it as a drawing tool with the rhythms and surfaces of thread and fabric, takes time and craftsmanship to realise. The design process is integral in selecting and organizing these techniques in addition to the skill in the physical framing and threading of a compterised multineedle machine, all these factors speak to the tradition of craft.

Cheney asserts the proposition that all materials have an inner life that can be listened to by the maker. Cloth speaks to him of a surface, with colour applied through dye and stitch, to imagery and texture created through rhythms in thread.