Some musings and meetings from the 4 weeks I'm spending in Somerset in spring and summer 2008
Archive:
Nearly since my arrival on Exmoor people of all ages had been saying 'Have you heard of Dean Thomas?' when I mentioned the Exmoor National Dress idea.
Dean is a young fashion designer originally from Dulverton, who made a name for himself at his recent St Martin's degree show, with a collection of superb (and I found out, all his own handiwork) tailoring, based around the theme of Exmoor 'cultural icon' Lorna Doone and using many local materials.
The Collection is on show this week in the town's Guildhall, and the opening night was mobbed, though I managed to get close enough to the pieces to realise that here was a guy who knew his stuff - there's loads of exquisite details that refer to English historic dress, but also a contemporary slant with neon paint and some quite radical cutting.
The next morning I returned to meet Dean there with the hope of talking him into getting involved in my project. His lovely parents were helping clear up the empty wine bottles whilst we chatted, so watch this space to see where we might be able to take it.....
Themes : costume, Exmoor, Dean Thomas, fashion
I'm feeling very pleased that so far - touch wood - everyone I talk to about my Exmoor National Dress project has been helpful and interested. If only all projects were like this.
Peg at the great Allerford Rural Life Museum is orginally a Londoner and now chair of the museum, which is one of those eccentric places where the labels are often bigger than the exhibit. In the Victorian school room part of the museum she drew out the basics of smocking on a bit of paper, making it sound as easy as pie, and promised to keep her ear to the ground for me. It reminded me of a Readers Digest book I hope my mum still owns, which as a child I perused on rainy days for the sheer wonderment of the smocking and plaiting instructions.
Maybe now it might seem as easy as Peg promises.
As an aside, I now realise that as a child of the 70's I was surrounded by the 'folk revival' and Victoriana ephemera of that decade, pamphlets on corn dolly-making, tie-dying projects in Jackie magazine, The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady. My parents were not remotely into this stuff but still it was pervasive at the time, and as a ludicrously resourceful child (and in the West Coast of Scotland, with many rainy afternoons on my hands) I got up to all sorts trying to make vegetable dyes, sew ragdolls and press flowers.
Themes : Exmoor, rural life, smocking, Allerford, Purlock
I’m quite worried about meeting Maurice Bishop. With his massively successful Exmoor galleries groaning with affordably priced local landscape paintings and prints, I expect him to be a rapier-sharp businessman, fiercely protective of his product and disinterested in other artists like me, trying to talk him into fancy conceptual projects. Carol assures me he’s known to be approachable and really rather nice, but it doesn’t reassure me that asking him to give me a few of his prints to cut and stitch them – won’t offend.
Lynemouth is not what I’m used to on Exmoor. An undeniably lovely old-fashioned seaside village reached via a deeply carved road (seaside thatch, I’ve never seen that before), there are suddenly hoardes of tourists ambling about with icecreams. I ask where Maurice’s studio is at one of the attractions, a model railway layout. The layout has an impressive innovation (I know a thing or two about railway modelling but that’s another story) in its chimneys excuding an ectoplasm made of Christmas tree ‘angel hair’ tufts.
Anyhow, the attendant answers as if I have just asked a Londoner ‘Excuse me, you wouldn’t happen to know if I’m in the right city for Buckingham Palace?’. Apparently you can’t miss the studio. I realise that contrary to my expectations, Maurice isn’t hidden away in a clifftop studio but is on the main drag amidst the fish and chip shops. When I arrive he’s actually working on a new canvas in his gallery window. Actually in the window, for all to see.
Five minutes later I’m walking away from the studio with a ‘shop-soiled’ canvas under my arm to try out. Apparently a duck had flown into his gallery, landed in the blue paint on his palette and proceeded to daub all the nearby prints.
Themes : landscape painting
On my first day back in Exmoor, the Archers Omnibus distracts me enough to have me haring off down one road in precisely the opposite direction than intended. A bonus is that I glimpse a ‘Cherries for sale’ sign, and having just heard a radio show championing this most fleeting of summer fruits I decide to pay the farm a call. The place is delightful in an Enid Blyton-esque way, well-kept orchards of apples and cherries and barnfuls of traditional fruit boxes. Living as I do on an inhospitable (to fruit, that is) windswept northern mountain, I brimmed over with envy at all this bounty and sunshine. I entered the deserted ‘shop’ barn to find a disappointing sign ‘Due to the weather, no cherries until Monday’. On sale there were two punnets of plums and some very rudimentary plastic bottles of home-made scrumpy. I realised I had only notes in my purse, but quashed my slight irritation at the lack of the promised fruit and the inevitable overspend ahead. Looking around more carefully, I found there were unpriced punnets of split cherries abandoned on the scales. I tasted one, they were very sweet, but clearly not intended for sale.
I put together a bag of items that I thought would cost about a tenner (including the split cherries) and left the owner a note by his till.
As I left he appeared at the shop door, and regaled me with a long story of the year’s disasterous cherry crop – good for nothing but schnapps now; the greed of the supermarkets and the impossibility of attracting pickers, with all the health & safety regulations.
“Give me a call when you want to buy the place off me” was his parting shot.
Don’t tempt me, I thought.
Themes : orchard