Penny is an Abergavenny based textile and print artist and member of the textile groups Adhesion, Madmountainstitchers, and Gwent Creative Stitch & Textiles.
Penny loves to experiment and combine different techniques and materials and wherever possible to recycle materials. Her primary interest is in the layering of colour and texture to create depth and movement using fabrics, fibres, and stitch, sometimes with the combination of print and paints to create her compositions. Favourite inspirations come from local landscapes, buildings, wildlife, myths and legends, and her love of the sea. After the sudden loss of her eldest son at 10 years of age in 1996, Penny turned to her love of art and creativity to help her cope with the grief and loss, and some years later took the plunge to enrol in art college and fulfil her longing to express herself more fully through art. At Hereford Art College she discovered her love of mark making, collage and layering through collagraph printmaking and the ability to draw with stitch using free-motion machine embroidery.
Around 15 years ago Penny made the move from primary school teaching to become a full-time artist and freelance community arts practitioner, working with groups across the Welsh valleys to promote health and wellbeing and social enterprise through the creative arts. One such project undertaken with Head4Arts and Blaenavon Heritage involved a large textile piece depicting the shops and people of a bygone age, with digital recordings of residents’ memories and stories of Broad Street. The piece became known as The Blaenavon Tapestry due to its epic size. The project involved members of the community gathering old photographs and memories to create some of the textile images through knit and stitch, and as not all memories are the same the project promoted much discussion and debate. The aim was not only to save and record local history, but to create a visual tool to promote conversations and memories with dementia patients in the community.
Penny especially enjoys the challenge of producing commissions for textile pictures working from photographs or sketches of a special place, view, pet or even on occasion a portrait. Under her Emotional Baggage label, developed from her own experience of using creativity in a cathartic and positive way to hold, preserve and focus on happy memories, she creates ‘memory bags’ or wall hangings incorporating fabrics, images, photos, objects, words, and ephemera of special meaning for the owner. In the new Frogmore Street Gallery, Penny runs textile and mixed media workshops with small groups throughout the year.