Caroline Park
Caroline Wood
Chris Bourne
Chris Vale
Elizabeth Heather Engel
Jackie Ludlow
Judy Dames
Kate Arnold
Lynne Russell
Maureen Davis
Rachel Hankins
Ros Gray
Sally Kidd
Susan Hutchings
Theresa Clarke
Valleri Jillard
Vanessa Page LLoyd

Annette Billson

Caroline Careless

Diane Thomas

Jane Rimmel

Linda Clerk

Mary Brittain

Penny Vere

Sally Field

Sarah Dixon

Wendy Tasker

Caroline is the group mentor. Previously Head of Art and Craft at Malvern Hills College she is now enjoying spending time developing her studio practice working with machine and hand embroidery; recently she has worked extensively with vintage ethnic textiles. The new pieces shown here surprised her because whilst she was working towards abstraction various allusions to traditional religious practices and beliefs somehow found their way in. The provenance of her materials has become increasingly important to her and the choice of medium is usually key to the message.

Exhibition pieces relate to the stops and starts of the pandemic.
Anticipating Pentecost was inspired by the feeling of hope for a new start experienced by many during the first lockdown, despite our fears and trepidations. The piece contrasts a growing environmental awareness with commercial, yet joyous Easters of the past.
The Importance of Ritual relates to the many and various events which, due to Coronavirus, were canceled, changed or held without the usual participants.

It reflects on a growing awareness of the importance of day to day ritual as we struggle to establish new ways to observe meaningful occasions or celebrate the things we value. This was partly influenced by day trips, undertaken in the absence of holidays, which often resulted in the discovery of beautiful churches; in particular St Cadocs in Llancarfan where some fine medieval paintings are re-emerging through the limework of the Reformation.

Caroline completed the City & Guilds Textile Art Course when her children were young but then resumed a career in Science. Since retiring she has returned to Textile Art and is now thrilled to be creating and exhibiting her work as part of the Elmslie Embroiderers.

She enjoys exploring pattern and ornamentation using a wide variety of materials and machine embroidery and has two pieces of this type on exhibition demonstrating a strong sense of order and a cohesive design style. The first (2000) is derived from ancient border patterns first found scratched onto pots in prehistory and continuing into recorded history on textiles, ceramics, built structures and more. The second (2021) is based on the architectural details of the Arts and Crafts Movement – specifically Elmslie House. Repeated elements are not identical to reflect the hand-crafted nature of the patterns.
The second strand to her work features landscapes in wet and dry felt, embellished with machine embroidery. These are augmented by a sense of elapsed time – the ghosts who shaped the land always leave their mark. Landscapes with a timeline form the basis of the other two pieces shown here.

Malvern explores why people came to settle in, or to visit, Malvern from prehistory to 21st Century tourism (2017). The scenes are viewed through the windows of the Victorian shop fronts in Great Malvern which questions the maintenance, or not, of heritage buildings in the modern town.

The Islands of St Kilda seem haunted by the ghosts of those who struggled to exist in harsh and unforgiving conditions until 1930 when the last islanders voluntarily left. Visiting their islands was a long-standing ambition and a great privilege – their ghosts are present in Caroline’s work (2020)

Chris completed a City & Guilds Embroidery course during lockdown, following which she joined the newly formed Elmslie Embroiderers group. She enjoys hand embroidery but is also keen to develop her machine embroidery skills. She particularly enjoys working on pieces which are inspired by and connected to her life, her family history and where she lives.

“Mayflower 400” commemorates the 400th anniversary of the sailing of the Mayflower in 1621 (celebrations for which were severely disrupted by the Covid-19 Pandemic) and celebrates the link between her home town of Droitwich and Edward Winslow, one of the Pilgrims who sailed on the Mayflower to start a new life.

“Mary Quant” was the final piece for her City & Guilds course and was inspired by the dress which she made for her O-level examination using a Mary Quant pattern.

Chris is an embroiderer. She is in love both with the English countryside and the ‘small things’ of life. These focus points are reflected in work completed during Covid.

● Remembrance of the Ridgeway in Wiltshire stretching from thundering Hercules aircraft heading for RAF Lyneham, the endless Oxfordshire plain seen from height to the mystery of the Uffington white horse.

● Comfort in domesticity resulted in 3 small studies of fruit.

● Always practical, stonework at Elmslie inspired slow stitching to labels

Elizabeth’s work is based on the experiences of real people who have suffered explores domestic and/or sexual abuse. Her intention is to raise awareness in the hope that we can rid society of this appalling, unacceptable behaviour. She sincerely hopes that her work does not distress or offend anyone, and we are showing it in a separate space which you may choose not to visit if the subject matter is not appropriate for you.

She worked with GRASAC, Gloucestershire Rape and Sexual Assault Centre, to create a banner for raising awareness of their much needed support work, and has recently been commissioned to create a new banner and because upcycling is at the heart of her art practice she intends to re-use as much of the old banner as possible.
Her mixed media canvases entitled “The Cage You Fear Holds the Treasure You Seek”, are an attempt to portray the journey of awareness of a victim to survivor of domestic abuse. She may well escape her abuser’s cage but she will never be totally free of those experiences and their effects.

Like many domestic abuse victims and survivors, Elizabeth’s flock of denim birds entitled “Blue Birds of Happiness”, will need varying degrees of support at various times, particular to each female.
Elizabeth’s very female knitted shape, created from recycled tights is the story of a 14 year old girl, sexually assaulted in her own home. The words “Don’t Tell Your Mother” carry the threat of repercussions, e.g. a beating or having social services take them away. They are words often used by abusers to control and manipulate their young victims.
The circular doormat “In Plain Sight” created from plaited, recycled tights embroidered with abusive threats invites her audience to literally stamp out abusive behaviour and teach our relatives and friends of all sexes that it is not acceptable! Feel free to stamp!

Jackie completed City and Guilds Embroidery and has worked with Caroline as an Alumnae student for many years. She admires the curtains and blinds at Elmslie House with their clean cut, graphic designs and subtle colourways, She has reinterpreted some of the motifs using contrasting colours and hand stitching.
Jackie’s own home is an old farm worker’s cottage which she has used as a theme on courses with Anne Kelly and Mandy Patullo and at Elmslie Embroiderers. She has created a piece, based on her home, using collage and hand stitching.

Judy prefers stitching by hand rather than machine, using threads
to draw with.

She relishes the unexpected, even the awkward, and most often employs a free embroidery approach.

After retiring from MAC (Midlands arts centre) in 2003 she completed an Art Foundation Degree followed by the 3 year City and Guilds embroidery diploma, gaining a Worshipful Company of Broderers’ prize.

Retirement in 2012 was the start of Kate’s foray into the world of textiles and embroidery. She had always dabbled, but a 10 week course with Kim Thittichai fanned the flames, and resulted in her subsequently completing a level 2 City and Guilds course in Textiles at Malvern School of Art.

Passionate about all things textile, there has been more stopping than starting for Kate during the past few years. The Pandemic coinciding with other challenging life events, meant she has consciously resorted to creating smaller pieces. She credits Anne Brooke @hannemadebyanne for prompting her to take part in the tag challenge during 2021.

The repetitive and meditative nature of hand stitch now form a precious part of her life survival kit, soothing her mind and soul in times of stress and sadness.

Lynne completed an Art and Education degree at Birmingham University in 1995. From this time she has explored paper, textiles and natural fibres in her work and she now works primarily in felting, botanical dyeing and embellishing work with hand and machine embroidery.

Lynne’s work and inspiration comes from the strengths and the fragility of the natural world, particularly plants. She loves the way nature’s alchemy can be used to produce beautiful designs in their own right and how she, as an artist, can further enhance them. Working with plant-based prints, inks and dyes as the starting points for her work she explores tannins, natural pigments and acids present in everyday plants. She is interested in the natural irons and salts that produce delicate patterns on both paper and cloth.

She enjoys experimenting with animal (wool and silk) and vegetable fibres (mainly cotton and linen) and investigates the properties of dyes and inks made from plants in her garden and the local environment.
Lynne uses wool fibres in a similar way as painters use brush strokes, laying the fibres in different directions and using a variety of thicknesses to create textural effects. She then uses hand and machine stitching to add detail to her designs.

Maureen’s work explores nature, human history and folklore. She works in a multitude of mediums including painting, writing and textiles to develop these themes.

Across her practice she aims to use recycled and natural materials, often incorporating found objects in her compositions. Her work is developed through a series of hand-made processes, beginning with creating plant-based dyes and prints. She also incorporates recycled fabrics, and hand stitching.

Each piece is developed over the course of a year, in a slow, focused practice, that connects the artist to the natural cycles of the year.
Dragon’s gate combines inspirations from the dragon in the Elmslie House gardens and a recent trip to Barcelona, with its breath-taking architecture, colourful mosaics and stained-glass windows, designed by Antonio Gaudi.

The first panel represents stained glass. The second is an abstraction of the dragon’s tail depicted on Gaudi’s mosaic tiles. The third panel combines mosaics in the circular shapes found in Park Guell, and the wrought iron ‘mouth’ of the dragon at the entrance gate of the park and the fourth panel depicts the dragon’s wing.

Since completing the City & Guilds in Textiles with Machine Embroidery in 2020 (achieving distinctions), Rachel divides her time between running her own business as a management consultant and expressing her creativity through textile art.

Rachel has created many textile artworks depicting landscapes, seascapes, trees and flowers – but her preference is to make ‘statement pieces’ to highlight social issues or universally-felt emotions. Her influences for these are Cubism, Tracy Emin and Grayson Perry. Rachel’s ‘No Justice for the Homeless’ piece was recently exhibited in Hereford Museum & Gallery during Grayson Perry’s traveling exhibition of his 2012 tapestries.

Her style is loose and full of texture, she dislikes formal frames and prefers frayed edges as a finish. Rachel uses mainly recycled items – buying scarves from charity shops and repurposing her own old clothes, curtains etc.

The triptych of a marriage breakdown is intended to express emotions that will be familiar to many. The homeless man is depicted in front of the Ministry of Justice building in London, an example of Brutalist architecture (!).

Rachel undertakes commissions for those who appreciate her ubiquitous style.

Ros loves colour and enjoys adding layers of interest to her work. She likes to use a mixed media approach based on her sketchbooks.
The work here was mostly completed during the various lockdowns of 2021. She began by looking at identity, and for the first time she explored the genre of self portraits.

Her other pieces are about her love of her garden and how it gave solace during lockdowns. She wanted to recreate the feel of a beautiful garden and the dreamy quality it can evoke. Her sketchbook is full of quick mixed media pieces based on her actual garden which she has used as a base for these pieces.

Ros completed her City and Guild qualification during the first lockdown. Her major work was inspired by her recent return trip to India recording how she loved the beauty and the colours but felt conflicted about the poverty, corruption, pollution and attitudes to women.

The title Terrible Beauty reflects this juxtaposition of contrasts.
The Indian pieces use mixed media approaches including adding book pages, burning, fabric and printing. They include Indian textiles where possible and all have secret messages hidden in them about the dark side of the country.

Her final piece has a very different starting point. It is a cushion inspired by May Morris’s mastery of embroidery and colour. It includes hand painted fabrics and is a mix of free machine embroidery and hand stitch.

Sewing throughout her teenage years Sally made simple clothes on a very basic Singer. Receiving an electric machine for her 21st she moved onto soft toys, children's clothing, curtains and other crafty items. Her delight in the play of colours and textures in fabrics came to the fore again after retiring.

Learning basic piecing and quilting allowed her to totally indulge in the yumminess of fabric, her fascination in free motion quilting aspect of the projects has driven her artistic development.

In 2019 - 20 she completed a City and Guilds 2 in Machine Embroidery, gaining a distinction but having stopped at College, started again with renewed enthusiasm in Elmslie Embroiderers, creating a variety of work including quilts based on Elmslie itself. In 2018 the Underground Railroad quilt had stopped but started again with many developments after being inspired by "Black lives matter"and with the support of E.E.

Sue Hutchings originally studied City and Guilds at Malvern School of Art, where she made her Coffee Dress. The dress was inspired by Costa coffee , with the drips of coffee left in and on the cup. More was then sprayed on and allowed to drip down the fabric. Twin needle stitching with bronze metallic thread in a wave represents the shape of the coffee beans. Approximately 800 plus Costa Coffee beans were drilled and handstitched to the top of the corset .

Sue has made several wedding dresses and is currently working on a Peacock inspired dress to be stitched at Elmslie Embroiderers.

Theresa has recently graduated from Hereford College of Arts with a BA (Hons) in Contemporary Design Crafts where her final piece was a kimono which relates Erik Erikson's eight stages of development to her own identity.

The inside features objects that are important to her at each stage. The panels of velvet have been printed with kaleidoscope patterns created from a series of paper colleges using the Adobe Capture App.
For The Sunflowers are Mine, created as part of a new start with the Elmslie Embroiderers, she has taken inspiration from van Gogh’s sunflower paintings and the letters exchanged between himself and his brother Theo.

In January 1889 van Gogh wrote:“You know that Jeannin has the peony, Quost has the hollyhock, but I have the sunflower...” (741:van Gogh Letters, 1889). Her cyanotype prints (created by the sun) are embellished with free motion machine stitch reminiscent of expressive brush strokes and the hand stitching is in the appropriately named ‘seeding’ stitch.

Vanessa discovered the benefits of a more creative life after a career in Mental Health. An Access course in Art and Design and a City and Guilds in Textiles at Malvern School of Art, cemented her love of textiles and mixed media design. Strong on colour and narrative, she uses the medium to explore personal experience and current issues working with a wry humour to address very serious concerns.

Her final City and Guilds piece, completed during Lockdown 1, reflects on the price of personal freedom versus the risk to herself and her loved ones from her jailor Coronavirus. The view from her sofa and metaphor of ‘a bird in a cage’ from Jane Eyre, kept her focused on creating, rather than dwelling on the tragic consequences of this Global pandemic.

During lockdowns, she found creating pieces that reflected feelings about identity and the Covid environment was both therapeutic and enjoyable. When Vanessa’s Work and Elmslie Embroiderers moved onto Zoom she created ‘The Zoom Screen’ and ‘Blue Glasses’ as a response to the personal scrutiny many felt. In ‘I can’t breathe’, she echoes feelings experienced in the week that she witnessed the death of a black man by a Policeman in the US, Bushfires in Australia, and in the UK an increasing toll of deaths of people from Covid 19. As we wore masks to protect ourselves and others, a suffocation of both mankind and our environment happened around us.

Like many others, her garden became a point of reflection, especially the birds who visited and the flowers she grew. ‘Garden View’, is just that, but ‘Cut Flowers’ suggests that appearances can be deceptive.

When will this end? 'is a question still to be answered.

ANNETTE HAS STUDIED ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY AT MALVERN HILLS COLLEGE, BEGINNING ON A CITY AND GUILDS EMBROIDERY COURSE , DEVELOPING INTO PAINTING. COVID LOCKDOWN HAS PROVIDED TIME FOR DAILY DISCIPLINE PAINTING, BUT SHE MISSED THE INTERACTION OF FELLOW STUDENTS FRUSTRATING

Painting and gardening have long been my twin passions and having recently
retired from a career in journalism I am now much freer to pursue them both.

I paint in a range of media including oil and acrylic paints, soft pastels
and wax pastels. I also love to create mixed-media pieces and frequently
include elements of scrap paper and torn-up sketches and drawings to create elaborate collages. My work is generally large and extremely colourful and I am striving constantly to try to capture the exuberance of nature and its extraordinary variety of textures and hues.

Growing up in the lodge to Madresfield Court, the grounds were my secret playground in the 1950's and 60's - nuturing a love of natural surroundings.

My earlier adult years were spent teaching in primary and middle schools, eventually enjoying the use of a dedicated art and craft room. Our children were adopted from Ecuador, and world travel has featured hugely in our lives, before and since. That has influenced my painting over these last 15 years, plus my love of photography, of anything that is of interest to me - reflections, autumn colour, winter trees, the corrosion and erosion of man-made structures - recording their history, however transient, before they're gone forever. I work in acrylics and mixed media and try to tackle a new challenge of subject or method with each picture.

Linda Clark was born in London but now lives in Malvern Wells. She joined Malvern Hills College around 15 years ago where she began with watercolours then progressed to acrylics mainly painting animals and landscapes.

I work mainly in acrylics, after many years of oil painting, but I also enjoy collage and print-making, and creating sculptures out of plaster and wire. My inspiration comes from history, mythology, literature and tree-forms.

Sally is an intuitive artist guided by colours, images and patterns that flow through her mind to her hand. The process is exciting and ever-changing.

Jen has had a lifelong passion for Art; she has a BA Hons in Art History and has studied the fine arts at Malvern Hills College under Roy Jones and Julia Beard.
Her work is influenced by the British countryside, its landscape, coastlines, skies, and the effects the weather and seasons have upon them.
Jen works from her own observations, sketches and photographs.
Applying acrylic paints with her brushes, finger tips, palette knives or old credit cards onto canvases and boards, Jen explores the energy, moods and essences of nature that resonate and harmonize with the human spirit.
Her influences include the British Artists Kirt Jackson, David Tress, Joan Eardley and Fred Cuming. Rather than talking about her work she prefers her paintings to ‘speak’ to you themselves.

After graduation from St.Martin’s School of Art and a career in fashion design, I now enjoy landscape and still life painting . My inspiration comes from the countryside and plants around my home in Herefordshire, where I am always surprised by the colours and forms of the natural world. I mostly work in acrylics and mixed media.

Meg has always loved art, and gave it up at G.C.E.to do other subjects, aiming at medicine, and lost touch with art. Now at 71 years of age, has been taught by Julia Beard over many years ,Meg has had immense pleasure in her artistic journey , and has been given confidence to produce works of art which include research and experimentation .

I have only been painting for about 10 years following a long career in the NHS. I retired early and decided that I needed to find a new hobby. I enrolled at Malvern College for Art and attended a weekly course for beginners in Acrylics. I gradually progressed enough to attend an advanced course and have developed my skills in acrylics and mixed media, mainly painting landscapes and occasionally seascapes.
I paint mainly for pleasure, but I have sold several paintings, my hope being that the buyers get as much enjoyment from my paintings as I do producing them.

A professional musician all her life, Penny studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London, but a move to Glasgow in 2000 gave her the opportunity to pursue her love of painting, taking classes at Glasgow School of Art. On her return to Malvern, she continued her studies at Hereford College of Arts gaining her Diploma there. She now happily divides her time between her two loves, music and art!