Part 4 Project 2 Stage1 Lois Walpole

Project 2

Stage one- Research six artists or designers

Lois Walpole

          

      Lois Walpole

The following details are taken from Lois Walpole’s website.  (http://www.loiswalpole.com/biography) 

Born in London in 1952 she lived there from 1972 until 2005.  Now divides her time between the Charente in South West France and Yell in the Shetland Islands.

Her artistic education began at Bristol Polytechnic in 1971 (Foundation) and she graduated from St Martin’s School of Art with a B.A. (Hons.) in Sculpture in 1975. City and Guilds qualifications in Basket Making from the London College of Furniture followed in 1982 and in 2003 she completed a Doctorate at the Royal College of Art in London. 

Lois has exhibited her work continuously since 1982, details of which are on the Exhibitions page of this site. 

In 1984 her name was added to the Index of Selected Makers at the UK Crafts Council. She is also a member of the Basketmakers’ Association, the Scottish Basketmakers Circle and a Yeoman Member of the Worshipful Company of Basketmakers.

Teaching is an important part of her work. From 1983 to 1988 Lois was a part-time lecturer at the London College of Furniture with responsibility for the City & Guilds Basket Making course and since 1985 she has been a visiting lecturer on a one-off, or occasional basis at many colleges and Universities in UK and abroad. From 1991 to 1994 Lois was an External Assessor for the Wood, Metal and Plastics Degree Course at the University of Wolverhampton. She has taught workshops for many groups and organisations and currently also offers tuition in her own studio, details of this can be found on the Tuition pages of this site.  She also gives public lectures wherever she is invited to do so in Britain and abroad.

In 1987 with the help of family members she set up Rapid Eye Baskets a limited company that was dedicated to producing contemporary ranges of domestic baskets using sustainable materials such as cardboard and Finnish birch ply. The baskets were all designed by Lois and produced by a small group of British craftsmen and women. The company ran for 11 years and during that time sold many baskets to stores such as Esprit de Corp, the Conran Shop and Liberty’s.

Since 1986 she has also designed ranges of baskets for other companies and for production by other people such as Body Shop, Marks and Spencer, Paul Smith Women’s wear, Tetra Pak and Jiva Co in Japan.

Her work has been written about in many books and articles and has been featured on television and radio in Britain and abroad.

She has also written 3 books and authored articles and reviews for ethnographic and specialist magazines as well as exhibition catalogues.

The following information is taken from “Urban baskets tradition recycled” 2010

This book is the catalogue detailing the work in the exhibition of the same name.  I saw the exhibition in September 2012 and my blog (http://iburkitt.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/lois-walpole.html) details the impact the work had on me.

What Walpole doesn’t really emphasise on her website is the extent to which she uses recycled materials.  Every piece I saw was made from what some might call “rubbish” Tetrapaks, parcel bindings, orange nets, bottle tops of all sorts and many more things.

Lois Walpole's work

www.shetlandtimes.co.uk

Martins Margetts ( (Lawry, 2010) gives lots of interesting information about Walpole’s early career; how she was strong enough to do her own thing at St Martin’s and how she gave up using chemical dyes in 1992 in favour of paints and varnishes.

When Walpole took the major step of studying for a PhD her research project set out to

Find new techniques and processes for the manufacture and cultivation of willow products, and particularly processes that could be called sustainable. (Lawry, 2010)

Walpole logged all of her results, some handwritten, and did lots of practical experimentation.  Kew Gardens became a workplace where

willow  was grown using formers and moulds (Lawry, 2010)

Margetts quotes Walpole

The chair grown for a grandchild will be an object of desire because of the time and care that has gone into its creation and the manner of its creation; it will not be valued by appearance alone. (Lawry, 2010)

Working on a basket of rolled paper

loiswalpole.blogspot.com

There’s  lots more information in the book that is probably best saved for an extended essay.  

Bibliography

http://www.loiswalpole.com/biography. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.loiswalpole.com/.

Lawry, C. (2010). Urban baskets tradition recycled. Walford Mill Crafts.