We love to showcase the work of other Irish textile and mixed media artists. Anne Jeffares is a contemporary textile artist and tutor who lives and works in Co. Wicklow. For the past fourteen years, she has been teaching fashion in further education as well as delivering courses and workshops in textile art. Her work has been exhibited in Ireland, Europe and America. Anne is also a member of the 04 Group of Textile Artists and The Irish Guild of Embroiderers.
In August 2017 she had a wonderful solo exhibition called ‘Tidal Offerings‘ in the Signal Arts Centre, Bray. It dealt with the space between the shoreline and the cliff face of the North Beach at Bray which has been a constant source of inspiration and discovery for Anne. This landscape, at the mercy of both weather and tides, is constantly changing, depositing a variety of treasures and detritus at the same time on the beach.
Observations of the changing cliff face and pocket size treasures gathered on walks have been chosen for their shape, colour and texture and arranged together for this work on cloth. Using sketch books and photography, each piece is built from hand dyed, printed and stitched cotton, linen, wool or silk. Anne uses natural dyes such as eucalyptus to colour the ground fabric and techniques such as photo transfer, wax resists and hand and machine embroidery to create the layers of design.
Anne has kindly shared some images of the ‘work in progress’ for this exhibition. The first image below is of rust dyed cotton, screen printed and machine stitched. The second image is the same piece when it was over-dyed using turquoise and magenta procien dyes – there is such depth of colour in this final piece!
The selection of work below is natural dyed, sand washed silk and silk tops, machine and hand stitched – all waiting to go to the framers
And two of these pieces when framed:
Anne’s work is diverse and draws inspiration from a myriad of sources. As part of “Haberdashery”, a group exhibition with 04 Textile Group in 2015, Anne created wonderful children’s dresses made from paper dressmaking patterns, painted, waxed and stitched together.
The exhibition celebrated the often hidden, unacknowledged and undervalued work of women in the home. It combined contemporary stitched textile pieces with various historical artifacts related to domestic textile activity.
Anne used the historical resources she had at hand in her work for this collection. She transferred images and text from a very old, well thumbed instruction manual for a vintage sewing machine on to fabric and dyed and stitched it, Kantha style, to create a evocative banner shaped piece shown above.
On a more contemporary note, Anne created this dress using machine embroidery to stitch lines of poetry onto soluble film which, when dissolved, leaves only the stitching and the squares of printed fabric forming the creation.
We look forward to seeing more of Anne’s work as she continues to explore all the processes and techniques she can find in the creation of her art.
Anne frequently runs workshops in her studio and has a Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/anne.jeffares for further information.