Deborah Mullins - Solidarity Stitching for Palestine
Deborah Mullins was a qualified embroiderer with a particular interest in the long tradition of embroidery in Palestine. She travelled to Israel Palestine and on her return home, designed and produced intricate and beautiful embroideries using a variety of colours and techniques to create images and reflections of the land and situation of the Palestinian people.
Read more: Deborah Mullins - Solidarity Stitching for Palestine
Back to the Wall
Trapezium Arts first exhibition in over a year, 'Back to the Wall' showcased all the wonderful artwork that has been submitted to our Online Gallery, while the real gallery on Kirkgate in Bradford had been closed.
Simon Sugden - The Beauty In Decay
In our first show of 2020, Trapezium Gallery was thrilled to present a photographic exhibition by Simon Sugden, from Keighley. His work focuses on old and abandoned architectural sites around Bradford. The photographs feature old mills and attractions way past their prime and devoid of human activity, but with an eerie sense of a forgotten time. Although these places stand forlorn, no longer maintained, the photographs capture another side to the process of dereliction, which is the beauty wrought by nature and the elements as they reclaim these sites. They appear galvanised, redeemed. This may be an illusion but is testament to the skill of the photographer who depicts scenes bathed in warm light and vivid colour.
Being Young In Bradford
BEING Young in BRADFORD is a collection of photographic memories from several Bradfordians showing the fashion, music and other stuff that occupied our young minds and time during the 1970s and 1980s (over 40 years ago!).
Most of BEING BRADFORD© are now in our 60s and have luckily managed to assemble a great collection of pictures that remind us of the way we remember being young in Bradford. The six contibutors to this exhibition were once an eclectic group of enthusiastic teenagers (+) who embraced Punk, Mod, Scooters, Soundsystems, Reggae and all points in between as they appeared in Bradford in the 70s onwards.
The Triump of Paint
Paint, produced by the grinding and mixing of minerals and natural substances from the planet we inhabit is the noblest of media. It does seem apt that the medium of paint is recognised and acknowledged, for it has been with us from the beginning and will continue well into the future to place on record our moment of being.
This exhibition, where large bold works mingled with the small and quaint, abstract splashes of colour sit alongside moody landscapes and intimate portraits, showed painting can represent not just physical reality but the moods of the mind as well.
Barbara Sheldrake, Jo Newbury & Mark Lunn - Enviro-Mental
In Trapezium’s 9th exhibition, three local photographers took the word Enviro-Mental as a starting point, and looked at how the environment is being encroached upon by people, how they pollute it through irresponsible tipping and how some of this trash can be used as art, to illustrate the damage we do. This is a worldwide problem; it affects all of us in our everyday lives.
Read more: Barbara Sheldrake, Jo Newbury & Mark Lunn - Enviro-Mental
Sue Wilde - Colour Zone
Colour Zone featured the paintings of local artist Sue Wilde, who creates colourful and expressive abstract works as an emotional response to the natural world, her own personal feelings, significant special places and family events.
Colour Zone was put together to create a visual impact of colour on both mind and mood, and to create a free sensory experience that is accessible to anyone!
Sue is a self-taught artist living and working in Bradford. She has enjoyed a life-long love of creativity and has developed her work through various community art groups as well as her own art practice.
Caro Blount-Shah & Pat Fuller - Common Threads
Common Threads exhibition takes a historical journey in to the industrial past, with a particular focus on textile manufacture and distribution, which played a huge role in the social and economic development of Bradford. Show-casing the work of two local artists, Caro Blount-Shah and Pat Fuller, it draws connections between the Bradford textile industry and the growth of global trade, highlighting the impact this had on millworkers as mechanisation and vast global demand took hold.
Liz Tolan - Look This Way
Old family photographs and some found images are the basis of the series of portraits of girls. Some of these were studio portraits, some more informal snapshots. She was interested in the way people were expected to look in these situations - the clothes they were dressed in and the expressions that were elicited. These are not portraits of the girls but portraits of photographs. However, in making the paintings she developed strong feelings of empathy with the subjects
Roza Zaleska - Containment... It's in the bag
Trapezium Arts fifth exhibition presented the work of Roza Zaleska, a local artist, who has been practising her craft for many years. She was artist in residence at Bradford School of Art in 2015.
The work focuses on the notion of ‘Containment’ and in particular, that female requisite accessory, the ‘handbag’. She uses it as a symbol to explore issues of feminine repression, both physical and emotional. Combining work in a variety of media: painting, photography and 3-Containment 02D sculpture, her work has an accessible, playful element which belies the raw social message underneath. It also challenges us to ask ‘what is it I am seeing?’; a reflection of the fact that issues of femininity are still hidden and shrouded in mystery.