The Bowes Museum Blog

Well it seems you can. Until Lockdown I hadn’t really delivered much work online and I had never done a workshop live on Instagram without the support of other people in the room.  But I’m always up for something a little bit different, so I took up the challenge and delivered a workshop on zine making from my workroom. 

I wanted to give it a try because as a socially engaged artist I need to find ways to keep reaching out to the public.  My work doesn’t exist without them and I want to use my practise to hopefully make some small changes to people’s thinking, that contribute to making some big changes in the world. 

It might feel like a stretch to connect that to a Medieval painting.  But bear with me. 

I feel that art lets us time travel.  Many of us, who make things, look at work that has been made in the past: objects, paintings, poetry, plays; we take our ideas and inspiration from all over the place, and we interpret these eclectic gatherings of historic material, into our work in the present.  That’s where Medieval paintings like St Luke Drawing the Virgin and Child fit in.  If we paint, we might want to look at the brushwork and see how it could help us paint fabric; or if you’re like me, you might want to see what the painting tells us about how people at that time thought about gender, motherhood or religion.  Maybe we’d think about how it connects to more contemporary art movements, like I found connections between the work of the Studio Dieric Bouts and Symbolists like Gaugin and the work of Frieda Kahlo.

I’m always trying to beat the drum to get visitors to go to public museums and galleries, to see how ‘public’ collections belong to us all.  We might not be able to take work off the walls but we can have opinions about paintings, we can place our own interpretations on artworks, we can encourage our own creative juices to flow, because we fall in love with a sculpture.  That’s why I wanted to work with the Bouts Art School, it fits with my practise of setting off a conversation (particularly with young people) and then listening and learning from what I hear them talking about or making as a result.

The other thing is that I’m a bit of a disrupter.  I often make my work in public (sewing shirts on a domestic sewing machine) and really enjoy making in galleries and museums.  I hope it encourages people to think about the artists and craftspeople who have made the work they are looking at, and about the people who work in our museums and galleries to keep them going, the cleaners, the staff on welcome desks, the technicians, as well as the curators, conservators and managers.

I’m excited to continue working with the team at The Bowes Museum.  The staff are thinking of lots of new ways to invite visitors to be part of museum life and I’m looking forward to being part of that process.

Blog by: Richard Bliss contemporary textile artist. Richard has also created and delivered art workshops digitally for The Bowes Museum during 2020 as part of the Bouts Project. Find more about the project here.