The artwork I'm going to describe to you now was created by the artist James Gladwell in 2017. The title of the artwork is ‘The Farm’ and it was made using hand stitched embroidery onto cotton. It's in the portrait format, so it is taller than it is in its width. It's 130cms wide by 146cms in height, which is roughly four foot wide by just under five foot in its height. The subject of the artwork is a view of a farm with five farmhouses laid out across the composition. It's a slightly aerial perspective, as if the viewer is standing on top of a hill or something higher up looking down on this scene. 

The artwork is roughly divided into what I'd say were three sections. The top third of the picture plane is populated by three farmhouses or three cottages, with a couple of trees or bushes in between each of the three houses. As we move down the composition, the middle section, the middle third, is populated by two farmhouses which are slightly larger as if they are closer to us in perspective. And there is a tree, a large tree, standing in between the two houses. The bottom section of the artwork is a series of fenced off areas, a series of enclosures, I'd say four, yeah, four enclosures three main enclosures for animals and then a smaller one with some chickens based within it.

There is colour within the artwork. There is coloured stitching, but the majority of the artwork is black or brown and stitched onto a plain white cotton background. Right at the top of the artwork, there are a series of small birds hovering in the sky, there's roughly 3, 6, 9; kind of 12 birds just very simply done with just two stitched lines ,so they are just kind of hovering in the distance above the houses.

The three houses at the top of the artwork all have their individual character. The one in the centre has the most amount of colour on it. It has a brown crosshatched roof. It has a central chimney with some little blue stitching of smoke emerging from the chimney to the left of the picture plane. It has six windows, kind of in a variety of different positions. They're not perfectly symmetrical or aligned. And each window is decorated in different coloured stitching. So, the one on the left-hand side of the house has a kind of red outline. The one just to the right of it in the middle, which is more kind of rectangular, has a yellow outline and the one on the far side of the central house has a blue outline. The windows on the bottom floor of the house as it were, have curved arches over them that are decorated in purple, yellow and blue. There are brown horizontal lines stretching across the face of the house and right in the far-right-hand corner we have a white door with a blue arched window over the top. The house on the left of this central house is slightly below the house in the centre, so it appears slightly closer to us and there is a nice little fence that leads from the house in the middle to the house on the left-hand side. And this house has four windows in the four corners of the property and the door is right in the centre, so in a big contrast to the house on the right with the brown horizontal marks moving across it. 

Now this house on the left with the four windows in each corner of the rectangle and the central door has two trees or perhaps pieces of ivy or climbing plants growing up the face of the house. The one on the left is made up of three different lines and the one on the right is made up of two different lines, like branches almost splaying out, and each section of the branch is embroidered with a different colour of stitch. As I'm looking closer at the artwork, I can see yellow thread, purple thread, sort of decorating the front of this house.

So, the house on the left is more sparsely coloured. It's mainly black thread on this white background with a little bit of yellow thread over the door and then these bright colourful bits of thread along the trees or vegetation growing on the front of the house. This house has two very small chimneys on either side of the roof. All of the roofs on the houses are angled at the sides and then come to a flat top. And as we're travelling along from this house on the left to the house in the centre, we have a tree just coming slightly in front of that little fence that I described, coming up with a rounded, like an oval shaped top but with some red stitching inside to indicate the branches. The third house on the right-hand side, top right-hand corner of the picture plane, again has foliage and this looks more like ivy or something growing within the surface, but again, done in a very kind of minimal way with just kind of two lines, one extending to the left-hand side of the picture plane and one extending to the diagonal right. The majority of the stitching on this foliage is green, but it has a few different colours mixed in with it. The door is in the centre of the house and again, it is black thread on this white cotton background. We have four sets of windows and these have a kind of latticework over them. So, each of these houses is very distinct. And this third house on the top right-hand side of the picture plane also has a sort of attic gable window so a window right where the cross hatching on the roof is. 

As we drop down to the two major houses within the centre of the composition, again, we have a series of foliage, trees or plants, growing up the faces of both of these houses in multi-coloured threads, which has a very kind of, very playful nature to some of the stitching work. The tree in the middle also has a black outline. It has two branches, one on the left, one on the right and then some smaller branches flanking off which are all again, multi-coloured, which has a kind of vibrancy of the tree actually being alive. The house on the left has a slightly different design to all of the rest of the houses, so you can see the triangles at the end of the gables on this house and we've got a series of different coloured windows. A red on the right-hand side, a blue in the middle and a yellow on the left-hand side. The house on the right-hand side in this middle section, and there's a nice sort of classic farm series of like four farm gates linking these two houses together. The house on the right-hand side has five windows. And again, it has a very different roof that looks as if it has the slate laid over the roof. So, each of these houses is very kind of individual. The house on the right-hand side in the middle of the picture plane has a very refined tractor done in about five or six different lines in a kind of profile with the front of the tractor facing the left and I'm really leaning in to see a lot of the detail. There are little people scattered about around near the tractor that are just a series of just small kind of caricatures to kind of symbolise the people there within the working farm environment. 

And right at the bottom third of the picture plane we have the series of three main pens with different animals within it. I'm getting, on the left-hand pen, I'm getting potentially a series of sheep or rams. And in the pen in the centre, I can see a kind of outline of a pig and a few sheep. And then on the far-right hand side pen, bigger animals, which I think probably represent cattle. And then within the middle pen and the pen on the right-hand side, we have a view of a chicken and some chicks with a little hen house. But the perspective of the pens is slightly aerial, like we're looking down on it from above, but then the views of the animals are kind of, as if we're looking across a field at them.

The overall feeling of the piece is playful, but also very ordered. Everything is meticulously placed and the detail, the individual detail, on each of these farmhouse buildings and each of the animals and the small people just in front of the two houses in the centre, is very kind of unique. There's been a lot of thought put into the individuality of all the different elements of this piece.

James Gladwell, he was actually taught needlework by his grandmother when he was seven and he uses materials he finds, and he often takes inspiration from his dreams. He works in collaboration with the Barrington Farm in Walcott, North Norfolk.