Textile artist Louise finally goes solo with pop-up show
Exploring identity through an often overlooked medium
Louise Goult wasn’t allowed to study textiles at school but she now styles herself textile artist, educator and community arts practitioner.
She got there in the end, albeit in a roundabout fashion, and this weekend is keen to share her passion for textile art at her first solo exhibition in the North East.
If only her teachers could have had a crystal ball!
The exhibition is called Identity and with it Louise aims to show that complex ideas can be explored as effectively through stitching and embroidery as any other medium.
She is intrigued, she says, by the question of whether there’s such a thing as the true self, given the way humans adapt to different scenarios and can be other than they seem.
“It’s about how wonderful people can be but also looks at the more negative aspects.
“I’ve worked with a lot of people who’ve had less than positive backgrounds, including women who’ve suffered domestic abuse.
“Their stories, along with a lot of other things, have informed my work.”
The exhibition is at BottleWorks, the pop-up gallery in the Ouseburn Valley (you’ll find it just upstream from the Tyne Bar, overlooking the burn).
“I went there last year and just loved the space and knew it would be perfect for the work I was developing,” recalls Louise.
“It’s all on architects’ tracing paper which obviously is translucent so the light was very important. I always knew with this work that it’d have to be shown at a special venue.
“And I do love the area. Although I live in Saltburn, I spend a lot of time in and around Newcastle and to be exhibiting in that place is incredible.”
On the eve of travelling to set up the exhibition, Louise tells of mixed emotions.
“Last week I was worried about things going wrong again but now that it’s finished and I’m looking ahead to putting it all up, I’m super-excited.”
An earlier attempt at a debut solo show in the North East fell victim to the pandemic but that might have been a blessing, even if it didn’t seem so at the time.
“When you’re at home and not able to do the things you would normally do, such as teaching in person, you get time to reflect. Suddenly the work I’d been doing previously was no longer important to me.
“It was a time when I refined my artistic practice.”
To go back to the beginning, Louse says she’d always been interested in textiles but with no encouragement from school, gravitated towards a career in early years education.
She was living in the Midlands then.
“I worked in schools and did a lot of work with children with additional needs. Then I opened my own children’s day nursery where we did a lot of art activities.
“I sold that when the Government brought in a curriculum for two-year-olds. I thought that was a step too far. All our art activities would have had to stop and it wasn’t something I felt I could be part of.
“Then, for a time, I didn’t really know where I was going with anything.”
Textiles, her first love, started creeping back into her life. She’d done some leisure classes at the art college in Malvern, Worcestershire, and signed up for a longer course to occupy her while looking for something else to do.
“I became incredibly interested in all the different techniques and how I could express myself through them.
“Eventually I enrolled on a three-year course as a mature student and I think, because I was then in my early 30s, the work I produced was different to what it might have been.
“I’ve always worked on themes such as personality and relationships but you don’t have the necessary life experiences as a teenager.”
In contrast to her teachers at school, the college staff were encouraging. Louise learned how to paint onto fabrics and ventured into the jewellery department. She found a champion in the head of art.
“She was really supportive and pushed me to develop the side of me that wanted to make a statement with my art, even though it wasn’t necessary to get the qualification.”
Having achieved that qualification, Louise stuck around for a bit, exhibiting and teaching as part of an alumni group – and for a while thought lecturing would be her calling.
The prospect of “tick-boxing” put her off.
“Art is a personal thing and what I really loved about the recreational courses was that there was none of that. People could take their art in whatever direction they wanted.
“I decided to just go for it and see how I got on as a freelance artist.”
She has got on well, hosting workshops and producing work for group exhibitions. An art residency at a museum was perfect for someone who also professes a love of history.
Then came another major change, a relocation from the Midlands where she had spent her life.
After a succession of annual holidays down south, she and her husband and their three sons decided they would try up north – and why not Staithes where the CBeebies series Old Jack’s Boat was filmed?
Louise’s youngest was a fan of the show and Bernard Cribbins, who starred in it, was a fan of the location, once saying there was “something about the sea air, the beauty and the friendliness in Staithes that makes it a special place to be”.
“By about day three our sons were saying, ‘Do you think we could afford to move here?’ We’d been planning to move anyway and had intended to stay in the Midlands, but they kept nagging.”
Eventually deciding Staithes might not be ideal for teenagers used to city life, the family widened their search and settled eventually on Saltburn-by-the-Sea where they have lived happily for seven years.
Louise has found a lively artistic community there. “My neighbour is an artist and I had no idea. We followed each other (on social media) and then I found out he lived next door.”
She hopes visitors to her BottleWorks exhibition (open from Friday until Monday, May 23 to 26, 11am to 8pm) will be intrigued and surprised.
As the focal point she has created a floor-based sculptural piece fashioned from that translucent paper. While she was planning to showcase stitching and embroidery techniques, no actual fabrics were to be on display.
She hopes people will be encouraged to think about the medium and the message – and if you’ve any questions, Louise, who says she loves talking about her work, will be there to answer them.
One reason her exhibition is timely is that it coincides with the new one at the Laing Art Gallery, With These Hands, which looks at the representation of craft in paintings and prints.
There’s a related programme of workshops at the Shipley Art Gallery in Gateshead and Louise is hosting one called Embroidered Summer Landscape on June 14 (1-4pm), for which you can book via the Laing or Shipley websites.
For details of Louise’s arts and workshops, visit her website, Louise Goult Textiles.