The Subversive Stitcher wins the Helen Putler Arts Prize 2023
The FaB team has the great pleasure of announcing that Holly Searle, The Subversive Stitcher, has won the second Helen Putler Arts Prize.
As a way of remembering our dear friend Helen Putler, who would always be at FaB opening nights and supported (and worked for) many of the independent institutions in the Arts in Bath, the Helen Putler Arts Prize was started in 2022 as a way to help support an artist involved in a FaB Festival exhibition or project.
The idea is simple: anybody who wanted to get involved and make a make a small donation to the prize pot, would then choose their three favourite artists from the FaB Festival shows and the artist with the most votes would take the pot!
For the FaB Festival 2023, 17 people got involved and votes were cast for 23 different artists with the winner being The Subversive Stitcher, Holly Searle, congratulations to Holly!
Holly Searle (centre, surrounded by workshop participants), The Subversive Stitcher in front of her winning work ‘The Subverted Vintage Tea Towel Series’.
With over 120 tea towels in the series, Holly started sourcing these and adding her subverted messages during 2020’s global Covid lockdowns.
One evening during Lockdown, whilst browsing a well known auction site, I started to search for vintage tea towels.
Like many artists, I found Lockdown to be devoid of creativity. I had made a few things, but nothing had come close to reigniting it until I started looking at these pieces of domestic gold. Here was a vast untapped wealth that featured so much more than just the odd souvenir map or castle that suddenly made my creative juices start to flow again. Here were little canvases that were ripe for me to subvert. And that's how it all began.
Each one of them deals with an issue that is prevalent in society. I have subverted the initial meaning of the tea towel with an overlaid statement to create a different perspective.
Visit thesubversivestitcher.com to discover each Holly’s tea towels and more info on their messages, along with more of her work.
The following 22 artists also received votes:
Emma Adams
Jordan Antonowicz-Behnan
Simone Asia
Dottie-May Aston
Katarina Athanasopoulou
Kim de Paolis
Pascal-Michel Dubois
Nicolas Faris
Katie Maria Francis
Claire Grainger
Kaya Isaac
Sarah Jordan
Deniz Kurdac
Tony Oxley
Ruth Peterson
Jon Raine
Sue Reddish
Jennie Regan
Joseph Simons
Julia Warin
Tim Webb
Lisa Wooding
Huge thanks from the Fringe Arts Bath team to Helen’s nearest and dearest for creating the Helen Putler Arts Prize, and supporting FaB’s artists.
You can find out how the prize works, how to support it, and details of previous winners on the award’s new website, kindly created by our good friend Steve Henwood: