Richard Mcvetis: Shaped by Time
Crafts Study Centre, Farnham, GB
05.04 – 30.07.2022

The Crafts Study Centre is delighted to announce the first solo show of British textile artist Richard McVetis. The exhibition will feature works from over the last ten years of McVetis’s career, including two- and three-dimensional textiles. At the centre of this exhibition will be a new configuration of his installation ‘Variations of a Stitched Cube’, shortlisted for the 2018 Loewe Craft Prize, that examines the systems in which we measure time.

For over a decade, McVetis has had a preoccupation with the repetitive

nature of a process, exploring the subtle differences that emerge through ritualistic and habitual making, and intrinsic to this practice, is hand embroidery. His process is labour intensive, and the inscribed stitches mark the rhythms of the hand, a delicate performance of obsessive intricacy, refinement, and physical activity. Meticulously drawn and stitched, McVetis records and maps time and space through multiples of dots, lines, and crosses, visualising and making time tactile and tangible. They record human presence, time and decay, each stitch or line acting as a marker for lived time, an embodiment of thought and patience.  The exhibition comes together to form a visual portrait of the artist, a meditation on process, shaped by time.

McVetis is interested in how a process and stitch can reveal a world seen from within, from a scale that can tell us much more about ourselves, and about our relationship to time and space. Jordana Martin, the editor of Tatter, writes, ‘McVetis finds this (stitch) an apt metaphor for human life. What we present to the world, the front of the embroidery, is curated and tidy. A persistent collection of careful footsteps. A map of where we have been. As our marks dive back down to the underworld, we find the more complicated, breathing, connective tissue. A dense chaos, partnered to the intentional front, vital to its success.’

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