Fairytale or nightmare…?

 

Mister Finch (or just Finch as he is more commonly known) is a Leeds based self-taught textile artist who crafts incredible, fantastic creatures from left over and recycled materials. As he says, doing this allows his pieces to have a story already woven in to them, as the materials have already had a life prior to being re-purposed by him.

Finch’s creations are inspired by fairytale and folklore – for me they resemble nothing so much as creatures made by an eccentric Victorian collector. The images of him at work in his studio enhances this – as a collector of ephemera myself, his cluttered, bohemian workspace really appeals to me.

One of the things I really love about his pieces is the skewed scale of them. Enormous moths and bees pulling coaches look like characters from the Butterfly Ball or Kit Williams’ “Masquerade”…they are truly fantastic beasts in every sense of the word.

Obviously, as regular readers will note, I am prone to a spot of recycling and Finch’s attitude towards this is one of the things that drew me to study his work. He, like me, really enjoys the fact of being able to make use of something that otherwise might be thrown away and wasted.

I admire the fact that Finch is entirely self taught – his work is beautifully detailed and you can see clearly how his love for fairy tales and nature is combined so beautifully in his art pieces. He says that the lost, found and forgotten all have a place in what he does – I love to think about the people who originally made the textiles that he uses seeing what he has turned them into – what would they think? They would have come from an age that was less wasteful than ours and so perhaps they would be glad that their work has been given a new life?

 

19th Century textile taxidermy?

I love the image above, its simplicity of colour allows the observer to focus on the detail of how it is made. Initially you might not see that it has two heads!

So whatever your opinion on this unusual and intricate work, you can’t deny that it certainly forms a talking point. Not sure I would want to meet one of those moths in a dark alleyway any time soon though!!