The Travelling Gallery: "Forest" At the beginning of 2007 Mandy McIntosh was commissioned to design the exterior of the new Travelling Gallery bus.

 
"At the time of first thinking about the bus, I was massively passionate, and still am, about Marrimeko, the textile studio from Finland, which was set up by some very talented women in the 70s. I was influenced by them for the bus because the sides of the bus reminded me of long print tables, I was interested in how to deal with hard area and surface in a printed textile way. I was also interested in the idea of a set or a backdrop, highly stylised visual planes that real landscapes and people could inhabit or flash past. Originally, there was a meadow and a mountain.
Some of the forest is hand-made some of it is block print, some of it is dense manipulated shadows, some of it is pure visual pleasure in what machines can do when you take them for a vivid walk. All of it is cut out by high precision machines that can read a line to a fraction of a millimetre, in specialist vinyl that comes from Germany. The vinyl is guaranteed for eight years and the sun will not affect it."

Mandy McIntosh 2007 artist statement for Travelling Gallery on the event of the first exhibition in the new vehicle. "Build it and They Will Come."

The new Travelling Gallery bus was launched in Spring O7. See www.travellinggallery.com for current exhibition and gallery locations