Key Works
Dinah Prentice was trained in traditional painting during the 1950’s. The choice of sewn piecing came in 1972 from a chance necessity to piece odd shaped canvas off-cuts to make a large rectangle of canvas for a painting
While patching the shapes together she decided to piece the hard edged forms themselves rather than paint the hard edges across the lumpy ground and a whole new manner of working came to life.
Another chance activity; a screen printing residency with John McGowan at a school in Northampton gave rise to sinuous edges in her images. These in turn necessitated new sewing practices; thinner silks and hand sewing to get round bends and curves and fine quilting to give durable hangings convenient for touring exhibitions. (Giotto's Flying Footballer 1998).
These later pieces were included in exhibitions with the Crafts Council and the British Council to Japan and New York. Since 2000 she has been using sheer gauzes to make images taken from small paper sculptures
My intentions are thouroughly anarchic
I want to use piecing as a revolutionary alternative medium to painting.The reason for this is that in spite of having acquired skills in drawing and painting, I feel alienated from the meanings that those skills represent. To change the medium is to leave behind the luggage of picture making that the history of western art is burdened by. For me there is something truculent and divisive about painting. Only certain abilities are acknowledged or allowed to enter the history. To sew an image first and foremost represents the putting together of that which has been divided or fractured. Secondly, since piecing started in ancient times as a means of saving that which was salvageable it also represents an accessible medium open to all. Quote : 88 Leaders in the Quilt World Today. Nihon Vogue 1994
Persephone Rising 1984-1992
Final Hanging 11x13 Feet ; Working methods
I begin with collages, paintings prints and drawings. Eventually these settle into themes and plans for a body of work. For individual pieces either 120" square or 12" square; I draw out a cartoon which acts as a pattern.
This is then cut up into smaller and smaller pieces until individual parts are marked round on hand painted silk and cut out leaving a seam allowance. In thin silks the pressed back seams enter into the image, leaving a stain or shadow to one side or the other of the seam/line.
They are reassembled by hand sewing. I have no respect for careful, even, dyeing, on the contrary I welcome splodges streaks and mixes. I have silks all over the floor as I search for just the right smear of just the right colour. Gradually the works come together like pieces of broken pottery being repaired.
I believe I invest turmoil into my drawings and in this case a print. I altered the print narrowing the shaft down the middle and introducing colour. I was working with an Art teacher, John McGowan, on a residency at a secondary school in Northampton. In the original print John McGowan had given children a project derived from my own work he then gave me any remaindered prints from the children. I rearranged these accidental bits into a collage, which was then printed.
The second phase came some four years later, after seeing the Guardian Article: New research is developing missiles that crash through soil and rock to explode in command posts underground.
I can only guess that the idea that the ground has been seen in ancient societies as being female, and that this weapon has a violent and murderous unconscious subtext, filled me with despair and the whole project exploded out into imaginative space.
I cut and pasted the two halves of the image. It had been printed in two halves on a small vacuum table, and narrowed the mine shaft/ vagina as the emotional form began to
I worked in several schools going in one day a week and working as a practising artist on my own work in the classroom,
The schools were in Northamptonshire and I worked with pupils from age 13 up to the Sixth Form.
The pupils studied the forms I was creating and worked on their own, but similar forms. These themselves became part of my work.
The teachers pushed me into considering my work and practise in unexpected ways in translating my forms into screen prints.
ix months earlierI had been in Toronto, Canada. Someone had pointed out the Crafts Council Gallery there. I do not remember the exhibition on the ground floor but upstairs I found a large room lined with report files.
I picked out a file at random just to research how it was done in Canada and read another influential milestone. A Canadian textile artist had made several very large hangings for an airport. She was worried that now finished they were too limp for the site. She was advised to hand them over to the Toronto Quilters to wad and quilt the pieces to
make them heavy and durable. Despite nervousness at the intention of the work being altered by the quilting process, the artist was assured the quilters would be guided by the spirit behind the images.
When I was well into constructing the piece, I was introduced to Sue Martin who would be key in quilting the final work.
I took this as a message and in spite of Sue Martins nervousness I handed over half of Persephone Rising. She showed me how she was progressing. She pulled out from under the bed a carefully wrapped and folded, heavy, durable, completed half and went on to finish the whole piece. It has been despatched, rolled up, re-hung across the UK and beyond as far as Tokyo. The last outing was to The Ruskin Library at Lancaster University.