1938 - 2020
BARBARA LAINE
Memorial Exhibition
A special memorial Exhibition of Quilts, celebrating the life and extraordinary talent of Barbara Laine, a true friend to Sprout Arts from the beginning.
11am to 5pm Tuesday to Saturday
Sprout Member's Private View: Tuesday 7th September 6:00-8:30pm
On Tuesday 31st August we are privileged to be able to bring you an exhibition of quilts in memory of Barbara Laine who supported Sprout from the start. Please come to see the incredible work created and learn more about artist behind the quilts.
Barbara Laine, 1938-2020
Barbara's parents were Martin Peacock, Professor of Crystallography at Toronto University, but originally from Scotland, and Katharine West of Glens Falls, Upper New York State. On the death of her father in 1950 Katharine moved her two daughters back to the family home, now in Putney, Vermont.
Barbara's aunt Nancy, was the school secretary at the Putney school, a progressive, co-educational private school and as such Barbara and her sister (another Nancy) were students there. It was the sort of school which had a farm, offered skiing (I don't think she was a fan, but it was in New England) and had staff who had escaped from Spain and Germany in the 1930s. Her art teacher had fought in the Spanish civil war. At Putney she began working with silver. In that period Barbara would have observed Katharine's skills at both sewing and knitting, although knitting was not a skill she developed.
After 2 years at Brown University studying English Literature the war bond money her father had invested in during WW2 matured and she now had enough money to spend a year at a foreign university. Because of the Scottish conections, and her relations in Scotland, she chose Edinburgh, crossing the Atlantic by cargo ship in the late summer of 1957, for the first of three times, when the price of flying about equalled the price of sailing. This is where she learned to play canasta.
At Edinburgh, apart from her studies, she worked behind the scenes in the university amateur dramatics group in the props and costumes departments. This is where she met her future husband David (Taffy) who was working in the stage lighting department. They married in 1959. It's also where she started life modelling, something she carried on doing until, aged 70, Croydon council declined to insure her. She sat in Edinburgh and Malvern and for adult education classes at various schools and centres around Wandsworth and Croydon, always avoiding those at which her children were studying to avoid the embarrassment factor.
For 10 years they lived in Nottingham and Malvern, bringing up 3 small children and Barbara developed her sewing skills by making clothes for herself and her children. In Malvern she attended evening classes in jewelry making and would make a new piece in copper before splashing out on the silver she really wanted. In later years the trial piece was made of silver before working it in the gold she really wanted. She had a hallmark with her initials at the Birmingham Assay office to guarantee the content of the metals she worked with, making the wedding rings for her children. On moving to London in 1970 she returned to silversmithing and also began working intensively on batik techniques which began her fascination with dyeing fabric. She went on more than one course to dye with indigo and her love of its intense dark blue was born.
When my youngest brother started school, my memories are of her getting up really early, 6 am, to do half an hour of yoga and then half an hour of Russian. This was the time when the BBC had radio courses in foreign languages. This she continued in London reaching graduate level in the language and was rewarded by American relations with a fortnight's trip to and in the USSR, getting as far as Samarkand in Uzbekistan, from where she could see China. Perhaps this inspired her later studies of Mandarin Chinese, also to a high level, never letting her partial deafness get in the way of things. French, Spanish and modern Greek were also studied. Yoga continued well into her 70s.
From the mid 1970s she travelled frequently, sometimes alone, sometimes with Taffy, sometimes with groups. In the earlier years it was mostly to Europe. She only took a camera in the later years, preferring initially to get up early and go and see what it was she really wanted to look at by drawing it. In the late 1980s she began to go further afield, to India and China. She went on a textile tour in India, she did textile work in Thailand. She visited her older son in Wuhan, China several times, always combining a visit with a wider exploration of the country. In 2017 her last long distance trip was to Shanghai and then to Japan for more textile and art adventures and her interest in Sashiko and Boro was further stoked. In 1985 she walked the Camino Frances to Santiago de Compostella, a life changing experience for her.
Despite her New England heritage her quilting was a craft born and bred here in London. She took the City and Guilds Embroidery Diploma course and then extended into quilting, often with applique. She was an early member of the Dulwich Quilters. She made many quilts for Project Linus, the group who give quilts to sick, disabled and disadvantaged babies, children and teenagers, and many for family members. One year she made the principal raffle prize for Region 1 of the Quilters Guild. She held several exhibitions here at Sprout, having lived in the area for long enough to remember it being a greengrocers back in the 70s. One piece of work hung in St Pauls church here in Furzedown for several years. She sold that piece, and a companion piece, to Poppy, who in the end would be her funeral director.
Barbara was not afraid of colour. She would spend many hours arranging and rearranging patchwork pieces to get the right development of colour, and would take work apart if it wasn't working as she wanted. Her designs were her own and, in a room full of quilts I could always recognise hers. She made a piece based on Sudoku, and other pieces based on the Fibonacci number sequence. Rarely did she just follow someone else's pattern and she never did hexagons!
In 2014 Barbara was diagnosed with 2(!) cancers and spent a year or so having various treatments, always planning the next trip or exhibition to see, between appointments and surgeries. She took her drawing books into St George's and when improving, would take them and her medical paraphanalia down to the open gardens within the buildings to draw another plant, another bush, another shape, another colour. At the start of 2018 her illness progressed and she made an emergency trip to Florence to see the art she hadn't seen for 60 years.
At the start of 2020 she made the difficult decision not to start on yet another treatment. Covid closed the museums so she didn't get to see the Kimono exhibition at the V&A that she'd hoped to see with her daughter and grand-daughter. But she was still sewing, with family members threading needles for her, or making greetings cards from fabric. People sent beautiful flowers and she drew and painted them. She watched programmes about the art of the Middle East, or Tudor history with emphasis on the clothes. She read the final novel about Thomas Cromwell, the Mirror and the Light, (all 950 pages of it!) during that period. She gave me fabrics and threads so I could sew bags while I was in London with her.
And on her death certificate I was lucky enough to be able to give her occupation as Artist.
(Margaret Nock, Barbara's daughter, August 2021)
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