Sarah Roche – portfolio

Contact the artist

https://www.sarahrocheartinfelt.co.uk
07900 565454
sarahrocheartinfelt@gmail.com

Artist information

I’m a textile artist, specialising in the unique process of wet-felting, a marked departure from my original career in educational publishing. I loved the work, developing and editing languages materials for secondary schools, but always spent far too much time trying to make the pages pretty!

The turning point for me came after a run in with cancer in 2010, at which point I realised I needed a change of pace. The possibility of beginning again, doing something that would allow me to tap into my enjoyment of art and the natural world, was wonderful. I am self-taught which gives me a certain freedom, taking every opportunity to learn from those of my fellow artists who inspire me. It’s a journey, and one I’m very happy to be on!

Exhibition information

My art is tactile and vibrant, allowing me to articulate my own, personal response to the natural world around me in all its changeable beauty. People often comment that it seems to reach out of the frame and pull them into the landscape, and that’s what I love about it. Somehow the natural fibres convey much more than just the view. They carry with them a visceral sense of place, how it feels to be standing within that landscape and to be a part of it. I love that I can look at the pictures I’ve created and be there again in the moment, feel again the connection I had with the landscape. The wool strands and Blue-faced Leicester curls, married with the glistering Mulberry Silks lend voice to my memory.

This will be my first exhibition since relocating back down to the Cotswolds from the Yorkshire Dales. My journey as an artist began there, inspired by the impossibly dramatic fells and hills which are everywhere you look (and in no small part as well by the sheep that are such an integral part of the Dales landscape!). It feels right then to show a number of these pieces alongside my fledgling Cotswold series. Over the last year or so I have enjoyed exploring the area, becoming re-acquainted with its wide-reaching vistas, gentle light and rolling hills, how the shadows play over the fields when the clouds chase across the landscape…

I rarely go anywhere now without looking at my surroundings and trying to work out how I can faithfully reproduce them in felt. I take photographs of beautiful places and views, I may use pictures that have inspired me or, in the case of commissioned work, pictures that have inspired someone else (!) and then set about re-creating them, hopefully adding my own response into the mix.

It’s never easy to achieve the results I’m after (as anyone who has ever accidentally shrunk their favourite jumper in the washing machine will attest!), no matter how carefully I place the fibres or how painstakingly I mix my colours the quite brutal process of rolling or agitating the piece in the final stages can either turn it into a beautiful work of art or else ruin it entirely. It’s the chance you take… but when it all comes together it’s a wonderful thing!