Ruth Issett’s and Dorothy Tucker’s overriding passion is colour: the quality or power of colour as expressed in fabric, thread and stitch, paper, or paint and print.
For Ruth, the obsessive training of her ‘eye’ to evaluate the nature of colour when combining different fabrics and surfaces, through different wet media and dyeing processes, is never ending.
Dorothy’s exploration of colour and light is worked, using a limited palette, through mixing incremental amounts of watercolour in paintings. Her multi-media hand-stitched pieces reference textiles such as kantha, Boro and patchwork quilts use recycled fabrics or the regeneration of old worn working clothes.
Ruth Issett and Dorothy Tucker first met when working with adult educational programmes and the Embroiderers’ Guild. They both now teach on a freelance basis in the UK and internationally. They are members of the Textile Study Group. This provides them with many opportunities to discuss their passion for colour and how they use it in their work. The sharing of their experiences and knowledge has become an important and stimulating part of their working practice. They have realised that neither apparently works in a seemingly logical or a linear manner!
The recent lock down period has made Ruth and Dorothy all the more aware of the need to engage and master new technologies in order to communicate. As a result, their responses to the many unexpected and exciting possibilities in each other’s work have come about through remote conversations. This exhibition hopes to share their highly tuned responses to colour, and to reflect some of the research, sampling and testing that they have undertaken as a result of their fascinating, complicated and often wide-ranging conversations about colour.