Gwen Hedley, B.Ed. Hons
Gwen moved into Adult Education in 1990 after many years teaching in the Primary Sector, with Creative Arts as a specialism. She currently works on a freelance basis, teaching a range of stitching and design courses. She also works in schools as Visiting Tutor in Art/Textiles, in both Primary and Secondary sectors.
Gwen’s work has featured in several books and magazine and is in personal collections in UK and abroad. She has written for several publications, and has published Surfaces for Stitch.
In her personal work, Gwen is drawn towards worn surfaces where line, image and colour have disintegrated with the passing of time.
For many years now, her design reference has been the shoreline at Dungeness which yields a rich harvest of aged working materials in a wide range of media. Derelict sheds hold old wooden shelves that are packed with discarded items. Earlier work has capitalised on this idea, using collected materials and boxing them, before setting them into stitched cloths. The abstract designs for the cloths, were derived from eroded boat parts, rudders etc - any surfaces that evidenced a layered history. She enjoys the notion of organising the discarded in order to create something new.
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Gwen draws directly from source, and takes photographs to record information. She often paints on old worn cloth, capitalising on worn edges, holes and darns, all of which give a sense of a previous life. Stitching by hand and machine is kept simple, using the needle as a drawing tool, to redefine, give emphasis or adjust colour.
Recent smaller works involve the tying and bundling of found objects and enfolding the assemblages into a hand-stitched cloth, where stitch echoes the marks of the design work.
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She is currently exploring the markings and lines that occur naturally on pebbles, walls, wood etc, using hand-stitching of a basic nature ......stitch is mark. This is work in progress, and she is at the stage of observing, drawing and trialling ideas .......nothing completed yet. She is also working on a new book, which takes up most of her creative thinking at the moment!
Gwen Hedley