Jane Arthur – Taking a walk: moving in landscape” by Jane Arthur

On Tuesday 7th April we were treated to an interesting talk entitled “Taking a walk: moving in landscape”, from Jane Arthur, an artist working in textiles, collage, and mixed media.

Her creative journey started in the 1980s, when she learnt to quilt, using a sewing machine and making large bed size quilts.

Since then she has become increasingly fascinated by how people experience landscape: the different feelings it evokes and the memories that are left. In her work, she creates a sense of place, including the time of year and the time of day. She believes that landscape can feed your imagination and your creativity, providing profound experiences, which can then be represented creatively. 

Jane showed a varied selection of her work, some of which was inspired by two very memorable trips to Antarctica.

She has also been inspired by the use of Google Earth, OS Landranger maps and their symbols, and photographs.

She works by hand, using a variety of different stitches, ( her favourite is fly stitch) dying and printing on white fabric. The dye is diluted and spread on, rather than dip-dying. Her way of working is to work on a long length of fabric, and then cut it up, often from the back, as she finds that this method can “jolt you away from the expected”. 

If she works on fabric such as shirt fronts or sleeves, she likes to honour the previous life of the item, by retaining its shape and any features such as button holes or cuffs. 

Last year a holiday in India left her exhausted but exhilarated by the richness of the experience. She brought back used printers’ cloths which were saturated with dyes from block printing. These make exciting backgrounds for her work. 

Thankyou Jane for sharing your work and your inspiration.