Viva Brighton Issue #63 May 2018

ART
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Ian Mowforth
The Dog Show
Artists Open Kennels
The Artists Open Houses festival returns for its
37th year but, with over 200 venues and upwards
of 1,000 artists to choose from, where do we begin?
It being the Chinese Year of the Dog, we thought
we’d start with The Dog Show, the canine-themed
open house of Joanna Osborne (co-author of the
fabulous Best in Show - Knit Your Own Dog, amongst
other titles).
Why a dog-themed open house? For many,
many years I’ve had a knitwear business with Sally
Muir, my greatest friend and co-author. We’ve just
finished our tenth book together. Sally has become
a very successful painter of dogs. Of humans and
landscapes, too, but she has a particular empathy
with dogs. I’ve always loved dogs, too, and have
started to make clay sculptures of them. They’ve
been a part of my life forever and ever. The very
first thing I knitted when I was eight was a dog coat.
Where did you find the other artists? Because
of what we do, we meet a lot of other artists, not
only from Brighton but from all over the place.
The ones we’ve selected for the show work in lots
of different styles, but they all make dogs. We’ve
got the fabric sculptures of ‘Holy Smoke’, who we
met doing Selvedge fair about fifteen years ago, and
we have the photographer, Alma Haser, taking dog
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