Finding Inspiration: Tamsin Abbott


'Lost Summer' by Graham Arnold c/o Catto Gallery.co.uk
More often found working with glass, project artist Tamsin Abbott's path of inspiration for Daphne's Glove has led her along a winding path from the Brotherhood of Ruralists to her own family.
 
"After various brainstorms about gloves and hands my initial response to ‘Daphne’s Glove’ back in November 2014 was to try and imagine or create a Daphne character in my mind and then work out where I would go with it. I bought a highly entertaining 1930's girl guide diary on ebay and began thinking.
For a while I was enamoured with the idea of a collage and admit I was highly influenced by the collages of Graham Arnold, some of which I have seen in the flesh, and one in particular I had found highly moving as it contained a diary extract from his father’s diary. However, after much toying with the idea I wasn't comfortable with my potential 'plagiarism' of this route.
Back to thinking about Daphne and I began thinking about my own grandmother and mother who both kept diaries and lived in Herefordshire. I realised that my mother and daughter had been born in the county and my grandmother and I had come to the county as adults, raised our children and worked here. I tried to think of a way of linking our four generations of Herefordshire women with Daphne’s glove and with my own glass work. I thought about layering the glove within glass with diary extracts or engravings of maps, important places, documents to interweave the generations together with delicate but dense overlapping lines.
However, I felt I’d lost sight of the original glove – it was becoming an incidental object rather than the focus. My thinking has now moved on and I'm almost there with my idea. More to come later...  "
Herefordshire generations: Tamsin's Grandparents on their wedding day, complete with gloves.