Caroline Hyde-Brown’s fragile and beautiful texile art highlights the detailed craftsmanship of embroidery.

Her work uses a mixture of media materials, but with embroidery as the focus. She produces delicately constructed trees and sews in dried flowers. Her work draws upon nature, reflective light and the seasons. She aims for sustainability, creating artworks using natural dyes, papers and materials.

She trained in Fashion Design, gaining a BTEC in 1992, then completed a BA in Textile Design in Nottingham. She has been a freelance textile artist for over twenty years and has exhibited in the UK and overseas, most notably in Japan.

Teaching and travelling have always been an integral part of her work. Caroline finds great inspiration from the people she teaches and countries she has visited, including Japan, America, Morocco, the Caribbean, France and Greece. In 2002 she was selected to travel and work across the East and West coast of Japan, exhibiting her work alongside the Princess Diana Althorp Collection, as part of a British Craft promotional tour.

In 2013 Joke Lunsing made a decision. To be kind to herself. To focus on her own passion for a while.

During her recovery after a successful operation for a stomach, tumour Joke felt she had been given a second chance. She realised that she had been suppressing and ignoring her innate desire to work with hand stitch for more than 35 years!

In 2015 she started work on a textile project named The Felt Beehive both as a means of feeding her artistic instincts but also with the aim of raising awareness about the plight of bees. She collaborated with more than 50 others to create a 4.5-metre beehive covered with felt in just one year. When that project ended, she started experimenting with eco-printing and textile dyeing.

In 2017 Joke registered on TextileArtist.org’s online course Exploring Texture & Pattern with Sue Stone. But she didn’t find the early stages of the course easy.

Caren Garfen is known for tackling tough topics. She juxtaposes seemingly simple textiles with complex issues like eating disorders to create compelling and informative installation art. Caren’s art does not hang neatly on a wall. Instead, she creates provocative examinations of issues that especially affect women.

Her latest installation art called ‘Room for Improvement’ is a classic example that exposes the overwhelming disparity between the need for and availability of services related to eating disorders in the UK. This ‘From conception to creation’ article gives you an inside look at how that work came to life, as well as introduces you to the considerations and techniques that go into ‘installation art’ in general.

Caren’s work has been exhibited widely in the UK and Europe, as well as Japan, United States, Canada and Australia. She recently received the prestigious Textile Society Development Award and has been a member of The 62 Group of Textile Artists since 2008.

Name of piece: Room for Improvement

Ann Vollum has been an artist for as long as she can remember. As a child, she loved to paint and make things from felt and fur.

But, although she had a yearning to study textile design, the adults in Ann’s life had different ideas.

Her teachers (at what she describes as a ‘horrendous and very snooty boarding school in England’) did not consider anything other than architecture a worthy pursuit for girls who showed an aptitude for the visual arts. And her mother was terrified that an art degree would lead to a life of poverty.

So, having been taught from an early age to tread the conventional path, Ann conformed and went to study Architecture at Newcastle University. She was ill-suited to the subject and ended up learning to be a graphic designer and art director on the job instead. Alongside this career, Ann continued to create art; painting in oil and acrylic, drawing in ink, combining the ink drawing with painted backgrounds.

Anne Kelly is a Kent based artist, author and tutor. She trained in Canada and at Goldsmiths College in London. She creates multilayered textile collages using vintage and reclaimed fabrics combined with machine and hand-stitching. She was an artist in residence at the Sussex Prairie Garden in West Sussex in 2014 and FIAF Abruzzo in 2018, an invited artist at the Prague Patchwork Meeting, World of Threads Festival in Canada for the past three events, Quilt en Beaujolais and Les Aiguilles en Luberon. She was a featured artist gallery at the Knitting and Stitching Shows in London Olympia and Alexandra Palace, Harrogate and Dublin.

Anne writes for ‘Workshop on the Web’, textileartist.org blog, and has had articles published in ‘Embroidery’, ‘Stitch’, ‘the Quilter’, ‘Pretty Patches’ and many other journals in the UK, Europe and the USA, including ‘Cloth, Paper, Scissors’ and ‘Fiber Art Now’.

Her books for Batsford press have been reprinted, the co-written ‘Connected Cloth’ and solo ‘Textile Nature’. ‘Textile Folk Art‘ was published in August 2018. Anne teaches and tutors throughout the UK and abroad for guilds and groups and private workshops. Her work was included on the GCSE Textile paper in 2016.

Anne believes in repurposing vintage and discarded textiles and uses techniques to collage and enhance these pieces of work in her practice and teaching. She produces commissions for private and public display. She is on the Crafts Council directory and member of the Society for Embroidered Work (S.E.W.) an international textile group.