Stephanie McLaughlin is a textile artist exploring the relationship between art and spirituality. Her work reflects this interest and addresses universal issues of hope and suffering, love and loss and soul and salvation.
Across four decades, McLaughlin has been working on tapestries, and her work takes the form of wool stitching created on canvas without prior drawing. The work is distinguished by this and by the utilisation of a small palette of colours, which she blends and uses throughout a themed series of pieces.
This exhibition featured a series of works that incorporated words and images inspired by the idea of the Sampler, which were always sewn by women through the ages to show their skills and marriageability, and by children to learn their alphabet and the Bible. Although some of the work is intensely personal and uses the artist’s family photographs and artwork, the works aimed to reflect on the lifetimes of other families and generations. Other works in the exhibition include the Lindisfarne Gospels to Miners Banners and textile pieces using text from T.S.Eliot’s Ash Wednesday and The Angelus.
