Papermaker
I trained as a teacher. Further qualifications include a distinction in City and Guilds Embroidery and a post-graduate diploma in art education (textiles).
The recycling ethic is very much part of my philosophy. What others discard, I save. I sort, shred, tear, and soak junk mail, used coloured envelopes, old yellow pages etc. I also collect and prepare natural fibres such as nettles, reeds, straw, flax cottons etc. These fibres and pulps are my media.
The ‘Junk Mail’ series, portrays, in largely abstract form, the Suffolk sea and landscapes. On closer inspection evidence of the original papers and printing can be seen. Lettering is embedded in the images. Colour comes from the original fibres. I add no extra pigments.
In ‘Paperworks’, I use pressed, cast, painted, office-waste fibres. The works are many layered. Embedded in the detailed, textured surfaces, are extra fibres, found materials, shadows of selected texts, relevant to each piece of work, be that a child’s dress drying in the wind, a bird on the wing, or a fish swimming against the tide.
judith@chestnuttstudios.co.uk
www.chestnuttstudios.co.uk
www.southwoldholiday.com
Lockdown Story
After 40years we are ‘MOVING ON’.
Memories Echo Within These Silent Walls.
We came to live at Annesley Hall 40 years ago as a three generational family. This huge, idiosyncratic, dilapidated, 1912 Arts and Crafts building with a wilderness of a wooded 2 acre garden had been for sale for ages and, luckily for us, no one else seemed to want it. Annesley Hall provided us all with a life style we could then only imagine and now, 40 years later, will remember for ever. Lodgers and friends enriched our lives sharing their interests, enthusiasms and skills. The galleried great hall hosted concerts and plays, poetry and dancing, table tennis, music, parties, exhibitions, and feasts. It has celebrated five weddings and witnessed two funerals. Memories do indeed “echo within these silent walls.”
To make the paper sheets for the work ‘MOVING ON, I recycled some of the mail, received during our moving year, adding petals and leaves from the garden. The ‘covers’ are 2 bricks covered in hand made papers. The pulp was made from recycled envelopes. Embedded are relevant texts, invitations and diary pages.
The decorated, dated, hand made paper covered bricks represented the walls of Annesley from when we moved in, to when we moved out. The sheets of paper, deckle edging showing were held upright, between the bricks (one sheet for each year of our time there) and made from our recycled mail, yellow pages, newspapers, with reeds and grasses etc from Annesley garden. Each piece of paper represents one year of family memories.
I am a teacher/ papermaker/textile artist. For this piece of work I used the method I use with primary schoolchildren.