House the sleeping bats, the summer swifts

7th - 12th June

Lily Garget, Sophie Minervini and Ruaridh Litster-Campbell

The Pipe Factory Glasgow, Fourth Floor

Above; appliquéd silk, hand dyed with madder and walnut, writing scans

A collaborative exhibition by Lily Garget, Sophie Minervini and Ruaridh Litster-Capmbell

Hand dyed silks and cotton canvas hold hands and birds

As twilight turns to darkness, summer swifts fly higher and higher to sleep on the wing

Along the field selvedge young nettles steep and are stitched on to

Madder root is warm to look at and the oil in the paint leaves a shadow

Walnut and horse chestnut are landscapes for wriggling shapes

Wheel thrown pots house gentle sketches

At the top of the alder tree, remembering has a colour

A Landscape Known

May 2022 and April 2024

Glasgow School of Art and Royal Scottish Academy

I am noticing the importance of wool and scent,

How lime trees make themselves so apparent to me,

How the pencil is darker where my hand is beneath

the paper.

Last night you said you needed security.

I noticed the ash trees and the roses and

Thought of you living here.

I thought about how I find security

In plants and colours,

And how I could link us in a space with colour

And fabric and metal.

Turning Outwards

18th to 20th July 2023

Lily Garget and Gus Rushin

New Glasgow Society West

Below; muslin dyed with ash bark, printed with ash cross-section, and madder dyed silk and inked stump with silk overlay

Our days have been interwoven with this fraying structure; holding, printing, pressing, drying, its back and forth, vertical and horizontal, its warp and weft, giving us a cattle grid to cross, a ladder to climb. Silk imprinted with madder and weld was slippery in our hands, pressed flat over burnt wood, the ring of the tree pulled up through the ink into the fabric; we wait for it to dry. Since January 2022, Lily and Gus have worked together to create dyes from ash bark and other natural materials, and print tree stumps onto dyed silk. Their collaborative work intends to record that which is in a constant state of flux, collecting colours from the forest floor and forms from rotting trees, dieback, soil erosion, and ecological change all warp our perspective of, and engagement with, the natural world. By focussing on certain aspects of the landscape, such as the colours within plants and the rings of a tree crosscut, the work turns the inner lives of these living beings outward. The light stored within is made visible, and the internal colour is drawn out. An attempt to imprint these aspects of a landscape into natural materials has led to a distillation of techniques and resolved work.

6 metre length of fabric, dyed with madder;

root of, red, south - grown for minimum four years to yield a strong enough root to produce colour, dyed in Angus with constant heat and constant movement, soft water hardened with calcium, pH7

8 metre length of fabric, dyed with weld;

leaf of, yellow, north, biennial, sewn directly after the last frost of the year, imprinted into silk here through powder, the colour varies where the fabric has been nearer the base of the pot, pH7

Printed with:

Oak; quercus, felled by storm, Milland woods. Years of stored light memorialised from in to out, printed in Glasgowby burning the cross section, scraping away the softer and faster growing spring growth and leaving the indentation of the slower growing summer wood. Ink is then rolled over the stump and a record of its life, years, and light is lifted

Ash; (diseased: Chalara, dieback), fraxinus, Islay and Glasgow. In Glasgow there are around 250,000 ash trees on both private and public land. This makes up for about 12.5% of Glasgow’s entire tree population. The City Council’s Arbor Team predict all but a few to be gone within ten years due to the very disease that felled this printed tree. The fungal disease is carried by the wind and attacks the trees from the roots, shutting down their xylem and phloem channels starving them of water and nutrients.

Yew; taxus, evergreen, Cut from a felled branch in Kingley Vale, a tree of poisonous bark. Burnt for printing with a mask. The guardian of graveyards and material of longbows. Fortingall Yew, the oldest tree in Scotland, possibly the UK est. 2,000 - 9,000 years old.

Shadow of Ash, framed print

The light stored as the tree grows releases itself from the wood as fire when the trees are burnt. Charcoal and ash collected from the burning, formed into a pigment and painted in the shape of the diseased trunk.

Italy, Val Tallegio, July 2022