Colours of Home is a public art installation for Aberfeldy, created by Poplar based textiles artist Lola Lely. The work will enliven the streets of Aberfeldy over the summer. A series of banners, made of hemp cloth screen-printed with natural dyes, this project is pioneering in its embrace of techniques that seek to minimise environmental impact. Lely has worked with a range of collaborators, in the local community, to produce the banners through low-waste, hyper-localised processes.
This exhibition in the Oxbow Marketing Suite for London Craft Week 2023 will reveal more about her making process which involved the co-creation of natural dyes in a series of free community workshops held in Aberfeldy last Autumn. The results are both beautiful and inspiring, with motifs inspired by natural and architectural features of the local area. This thoughtful design and the experimental processes involved not only demonstrate Lely’s achievements as a maker whose work focuses on interconnection between the natural world and material culture, but also provides an opportunity to reflect on the inherent sustainability of large-scale public art installations, providing a model of how these could be achieved differently in the future.
