In The Open | Harriette Yarrington Hamilton & Jan Johnson

This collaborative piece is a response to a visit with Laura Donkers on Uist to participate in the Sewing Wildflowers programme, which encourages pollinators through seeding for wildflower growth in the UK. Johnson responded to Sea pinks (Armeria Maritima) which Laura pointed out blooming along the salt marshes. The title is loosely stitched and taken from a poem ‘The Visible World” by Jorie Graham. This work was a contribution to the exhibition for the GROW WILD community project, part of Local Food for Local people Project CCF-4744. This stitched book with Hamilton and Johnson grows further out of conversations and correspondence regarding bees, wildflowers, pollinators, art practice and research, motherhood, family, walks in fields, bogs and muirs in Scotland.

Harriette Yarrington Hamilton is an artist based in Glasgow. She is a PhD candidate at Duncan of Jordanstone Collage of Art and Design at the University of Dundee, where she received her BA (Hons) and MFA in Art & Humanities. She was selected for the New Contemporaries at the Royal Scottish Academy of Art in 2013. Her practice-based art research focuses on bees.

Jan Johnson holds an MFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design. In 2010, she was awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Drawing. She was a Fulbright Scholar at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design at University of Dundee in 2015-16, with her project, “On Stitching in Scotland: Stories, Schemes and Contingencies of a Gendered Material Practice.” Johnson is the coordinator of the International Summer Experience at DJCAD, and a Part-time Professor of Practice at Clark University in Worcester, MA. Her work has been shown throughout the US, and internationally in Greece and the UK. She is a member of PLaCE International (UK).