There is rarely enough time to stop, relax and maybe visit an exhibition during the days before Christmas as we're all usually too busy rushing around to find the perfect present for a dear one, putting the final touches to the decorations or shopping for groceries. Yet, if you don't have much time, but love textiles and feel like taking a break from the Christmas routine and you're in the Somerset area, stop at Black Swan Arts in Frome.
The Long Gallery of this art space offers indeed the chance to explore a compact but intriguing exhibition, entitled "Extremely Textiles" (until 22nd December).
Curated by Sandra Porter from the Black Swan Arts Programming Group, the exhibition features a series of handmade pieces by textile artisans, artists and designers. Among them there are local artists Julia Penrose and Sarah Truscott, and members of the Bath-based Seam collective (that includes emerging and established embroiderers, printers, knitters, weavers, dyers, fashion designers, eco-designers, makers and artists) – Desiree Goodall, Gill Hewitt, Julie Heaton, Angie Parker, Linda Row, Joy Merron and Kate Bond. 
While celebrating Frome's rich textile tradition, the exhibition showcases a variety of skills, styles, techniques and materials employed to create decorative or functional pieces such as the needle punched art panels and screens by Gill Hewitt, Julia Penrose's collages or the rugs and wall-hangings woven by Sarah Truscott using natural fibres such as fine cotton, linen, wild silk and merino wool.
The creations on display go indeed from arty works to interior design pieces, but most of them are made by hand: Joy Merron works for example with geometries and questions through her pieces such as her soft pyramids made of circular doughnut-like elements, our perceptions of everyday objects and materials.
Linda Row has conducted experiments with materials in the past, trying to find ways to use textile based apparel and interior design products to neutralize harmful electromagnetic frequencies, while more recently she focused on natural products like fabrics dyed with shiitake mushrooms.
Inspired by her time in India and the graffiti in her neighbourhood in Bristol, Angie Parker creates colourful rugs characterised by intricate patterns and vibrant shades using the Scandinavian weaving technique called Krokbragd.
Some of these pieces prove that weaving and stitching are valid mediums for art: one of the most striking piece on a technical level remains "A Couple on the Tube" by Julie Heaton that, from a distance, looks like a painting.
The piece moves from an experiment: the artist wanted to see if it was possible to draw and paint using embroidery threads.
The challenge was hard as Heaton had to enlarge a drawing of a couple travelling on the underground, transfer it on dissolvable fabric and experiment with the threads, finding ways to recreate a series of complex textures and effects, from the tones of the flesh of her characters to their clothes and the materials surrounding them, including the plastic bag the woman is carrying or the warning signs on the underground.
The results are mesmerising especially when you consider not just the details the artist managed to include in the piece, but also the depth of the piece that allows visitors to literally enter the scene and look through the window of the train to the scene going on behind the back of the main characters, injecting in the piece the pulse of lived reality.
While this was a first experiment for Heaton, the artist hopes to turn more drawings into paintings made with threads and it will be exciting to see what she will come up with next.