Hello, my name is Macie and I am a year 10 student from Newark academy who is doing my work experience at the hub. My favourite subject at school is art, which is why I chose to do my work experience at the hub. I believed that it would be a fun place to do my work experience here and I was not wrong!

The hub has a friendly community and have wonderful exhibitions to explore. An exhibition that I was looking at was called “Translating Nature” which featured artists from Nottinghamshire and nearby areas work in a variety of media, from ceramics and jewellery to mixed media and textiles.

Walking around the gallery I could already tell that I was consumed by all the patterns and colours of art that surrounded me. Everything was beautiful but the two art pieces that especially caught my attention were from the artists J.C Middlebrook and Sarah-May Johnson.

I looked at J.C Middlebrooks website (www.jcmiddlebrook.co.uk) so I could find out more about her and what inspired her to do this kind of artwork.

I found out that her work incorporates technical drafts from a now demolished lace-curtain factory. They are covered in words or codes, which would have been translated by factory hands. The embroidery and lace reflect the craftwork within the machine-made textiles. I also found out that she was inspired by the history of Nottingham’s lace industry.

What I liked about her artwork was the colour combinations and how the light blue and light pink mixed well within the white lace but the best thing that caught my attention was the patterns that were embroidered into the lace, the detail was very carefully done and easy to attract people’s attention whilst wondering around.

Meanwhile Sarah-May Johnsons artwork is more complex because her artwork includes lines of fabric that overlap each other creating an illusion of repeated patterns. She is a woven textile artist based in east midlands. Her artwork is constructed on the loom, which helps her create more complicated patterns. Sarah-May Johnson increasingly gets more and more interested in repetition, symmetry, and the Fibonacci sequence, which is a sequence in which number is the sum of the two preceding ones.

Natural world is a constant-source of inspiration to Johnson, which she expresses through colours and patterns.

I like her artwork because it has an illusion that makes the patterns look endless and it makes me wonder when will the patterns end? Another reason I like Johnson’s artwork are the colours, the colours of the fabric are in different shades of blue that also help with the illusion of repetition.

I found the exhibition very interesting, and I found certain artists and their artworks mesmerising. I think this exhibition was clever how it had different artists working with different medias that linked to “Translating Nature”. In my opinion this exhibition was defiantly worth looking at.