Jane is a textile artist working with hand stitch; she uses the thread to create marks, line and patterns and translates her love of colour, texture, pattern, the feel of fabric and thread in her hands to her work through the needle.
She constantly struggles with the barriers between seen as a stitcher versus being seen as an artist. Her attempt to create work that will encourage the viewer to see her fabric and threads as a medium in the same way that other fine artists choose paint or clay.
Her work is strong and bold, stitching quirky narratives, still life, using the traditional inspiration of vases, domestic items and interiors, and more abstract pieces that allow the viewer to enjoy their own interpretations.
Maps and cityscapes provide her with ideas, creating compositions through careful consideration of the placement of simple, diagrammatic block forms.
Gill is a local textile artist who has lived and worked in the Guildford area for over 40 years. Having always been creative from an early age, when her children had grown up, she was able to return to sewing, starting with patchwork and then moving on to a variety of techniques and materials.
Over the last year, Gill has been experimenting with print and hand dye techniques and uses the resulting fabrics to make small stitched bowls.
She is inspired by her background in Biology to create small sculptures from vintage materials based on flora and fauna.
Gill also designs and makes colourful metallic pictures that she stitches and melts. Having created many pictures based on Russian architecture she is currently working on a series of fish designs!
Naomi is a Surrey textile and mixed media artist looking at the sunny side of life. She loves combining her handcrafted birds and other familiar animals with vintage garden tools and kitchenalia, all of which have their own story.
Naomi is a member of the Society of Designer Craftsmen.
Freight of Memory- What Makes Us?
Lois continues to develop the vitrines that make up her ever expanding memory wall by highlighting selected areas of experience that define aspects of identity.
She acknowledges there is balance of positive and negative experience within the ‘freight’ of memory. Sensory or haptic connections to remote memories can immediately trigger emotional imbalance. Toxic components from everyday life affect this equanimity.
A rhythm in life is certain and things disturb that rhythm with frequent regularity. Red holographic thread and small squares of fabric in Lois’s work echo such moments.
Hand stitch, rust marks and the use of found objects are fundamental elements of her practice.
Katrin is an artist and designer working primary with wool as a ‘painting’ medium. Although she enjoys using wool in a craft application during hand spinning and weaving, she finds that during needle felting (also known as dry felting) there is more scope for letting her imagination run away.
Katrin’s starting point is always a photograph, painting or drawing of her own and during this process she is already looking at form and colour in her subject matter. Carrying ideas across to wool involves careful blending of dyed locks using carding brushes to create new shades and mix colours in the same way as one would mix paint. Layers of fibre are built up and attached to one another using a barbed felting needle that simply latches the individual hairs to one another to form felt. Wool from different varieties of sheep allows for different effects with curls giving more texture than smoother types. Different needles allow for finer work and detail.
Katrin’s subject matter tends to focus on landscapes, although recently she worked on a series of flower studies based on sketches from her garden during the summer months.
Working with wool not only gives visual reward from the use of colour but also the pleasure of working with a soft and comforting medium which has been known to man for thousands of years yet is still being pushed in new directions.
Many of her wool art pictures are available as cards and printed items through her website and she periodically offers workshops in needle felting methods.
Jo is a hand weaver and textile artist based in Farnham. Jo uses the structure and form inherent to weaving as boundaries that can be pushed to create abstract images. Her work is also a response to the fibres that are used and the choice of fibre will reflect on what is being explored at the time. Most of Jo’s works are of a decorative nature and include wall hangings and framed pieces that are for hanging in a domestic or business environment.
Jo currently has two main bodies of work, Aphrodite’s Girdle and TTM. The Aphrodite’s Girdle series are inspired by Neolithic “Venus” figures and their decoration. These early representations of what is essentially feminine inform the works in this group, which are largely spontaneous, captured moments. Related to these are the very different TTM works that are abstracted pictorial pieces based on natural phenomena. These too capture a point in time, but are seeking a still point of reflection rather than an instance of energy.
I am interested in the boundaries that can be pushed, from which abstracted images interpreting natural phenomena can be produced.
Paulene’s work concentrates on the urban built environment, often highlighting the overlooked minutiae of city streets, bringing to the fore the background noise of society.
Recent work has focussed on a dilapidated post box.
Charlotte’s textile pictures are created by machine and hand stitching, often onto hand printed fabric. Her strong sense of simplistic design, colour and love of nature influence her work. More recently she has been trying more different techniques by stitching into rust, eco and indigo printed fabric.
She is inspired by nature and her love of experimenting with colour and texture and trying unconventional combinations.
She is a member of Ochre Print Studio in Guildford and Surrey Artists Open Studios.
After a career within the National Health Service covering clinical risk management, the design of healthcare facilities and nursing, Deena developed an interest in textiles, initially starting with traditional methods of quilting using cotton fabric and classic designs. On discovering an array of diverse techniques that can be employed, her interests evolved into more contemporary work using other types of fabrics with a mix of media. Her work continues to be developed, where world-wide topics are explored and events are expressed using textiles and other fabrics.
