Tracery
Venice and the Lakes Interlaced
Blue Gallery at Brantwood, John Ruskin’s House in the Lake District
20 April – 11 July 2023
Catalogue available
‘Tracery’ Venice and the Lakes Interlaced
The Blue Gallery Brantwood House, Lake District, UK
20 April – 11 July 2023
.
Tracery is an exhibition of Déirdre Kelly’s works that emulate Ruskin’s dedication to observation and to the creativity of the individual human hand. It is also a tale of two places, geographically distant, that converged in Ruskin’s love of place and beauty: Venice and the Lake District.
Kelly has engaged in an intimate virtual dialogue with the lace-makers of Venice’s past, via privileged access to their surviving works, materials and tools. She has made a new series of works that manipulate cartography while using the aesthetic language of lace: translations, interpretations and reiterations of the ‘imparaticci’, paper designs that passed down through the hands of lace-makers from Burano for centuries.
In a thoughtful response to the outstanding lace collection archived in the Museum of Lace in Burano and Library of the History of Textiles and Costume at Palazzo Mocenigo in Venice, Kelly’s intervention in tracing the authentic antique Venetian lace designs into maps of the Lake District and other places, pays homage and in so doing aims to give an enduring voice to the social and cultural heritage of the islands of Venice.
