Turner Dumbrell artist collaborates with Ditchling Museum

This year saw an exciting nearly year-long collaboration between Turner Dumbrell Workshops occupant Julie Rignell and Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft. Julie is a contemporary basketmaker and fibre artist who has been at the Turner Dumbrell Workshops since 2018. Julie specialises in English rush work, sculptural coiled basketry forms and in using unusual plants and fibres in her work, much of it home grown or foraged locally.

In autumn 2024, Julie was commissioned to devise an installation which would provide a craft activity that visitors could join in with as part of their visit to the museum’s exhibition:   Tadek Beutlich : On and Off the Loom. Beutlich was an innovative and renowned weaver and textile artist who lived and worked in Ethel Mairet’s former home and workshop, The Gospels, in Ditchling from the late 1960’s.

Titled Regenerate, the installation had a botanical theme and was inspired by Ditchling and the plants and trees growing around the area. Julie used a local blacksmith to fabricate a giant metal spiral that was hung from the ceiling of the intro gallery at the museum. In the autumn, she collected hundreds of seedheads from the hedgerows, verges and private gardens in and around Ditchling. Many were harvested from around Lodge Hill, which is in the heart of the village and owned by the Turner Dumbtrell Foundation. Julie spent the autumn preparing the seedheads, which all had to be dried, cleaned and given a couple of days in the deep freeze to make sure no bugs or diseases could get in to contaminate the rest of the exhibition or the museum’s collection.

During their visit to the exhibition, visitors had the chance to choose and wrap a seed head with coloured yarn, which Julie then arranged and hung from the spiral each week. The yarn colours were all inspired by what was growing around Ditchling at the time, so changed and became more colourful as the seasons progressed. The activity and installation was phenomenally popular, so much so that both seedheads and yarns had to be rationed and two complete spirals of seedheads were created. There were some fabulously creative contributions, with over 700 visitors wrapping a seedhead during their visit!

We think it is the first time in recent history that a local Turner Dumbrell artist and maker has collaborated with Ditchling Museum in this way. We are pleased that the workshops and land looked after by the Turner Dumbrell Foundation were able to play a key role in enabling the project.