Anna King – Gallery TEN

‘Anna S King makes beautiful things. The reductive description of her as a ‘fibre artist’ does little justice to the richness of her work, which is built on a close relationship to the natural world, an instinctive practice of a wide range of craft skills, and an unerring eye for colour and design. Through a continuous expansion of those skills, a study of makers in other cultures – particularly Japan and North America – and a re-learning of ancient traditional skills such as the twisting of fibre from bark and grasses, King has become best known for intimate objects, her woven containers sometimes like baskets, sometimes like nests, sometimes like both.’

Andrew Guest, from review in Crafts Magazine of A Quiet Intervention: Anna S King at Dawyck Botanic Gardens 2011

New works for COLLECT 2015 from Anna S King showing with Gallery TEN on stand 7.5

Anna King is an Edinburgh based basket-maker.

‘Mostly, I work with words – TEXT. The words are the raw material from which I derive inspiration and ideas. The words are held in journals and diaries that I kept for many years. Something I wrote twenty years ago might have been interpreted in one way then. I can look at those words now and see them in an entirely new con TEXT and so interpret them in a new way, but the immediacy of the first emotional response is not lost in the intervening years.

With the tapestries, the words are sometimes hidden within the TEXTure of the weaving. The coiled basket forms give the words an enclosed environment to live in, or rest, waiting for the observant enquirer to investigate. The conTEXT of the basket invites curiosity. Decorative additions on the surface or interior are there for symbolic as well as aesthetic reasons. They are not arbitrary, their purpose is to imbue a sense of place, evoke a memory, serve as a token.’

The-Three by Anna King