Helen Walsh
Based on the beautiful Solway Coast, Helen is an artist and creative practitioner, specialising in drawing, textiles and embroidery. Fascinated by the natural world, Helen uses her art to explore her connection to it, particularly motifs of birds and feathers as symbols of the human desire to transcend.
Helen works predominantly with natural fibres such as wool, silk and linen, and enjoys learning traditional textile skills such as felting and dyeing as a way to connect with forgotten makers of times gone by.
Helen is also an experienced workshop leader, involved in various community and education-based arts projects. She is passionate about working with a diverse range of people across different settings to enable them to release their creative potential.
Helen's Piece for Forgotten Fleece Tales
Helen has created a three-dimensional figure of a wren on its nest, inspired by her love of nature and the ingenuity of animals. The nest is crocheted with hand-spun yarn and gold thread, lined with foraged fleece, and completed with a clutch of pearl eggs. The wren itself is created from tweed scraps with embroidered and needle-felted details. All of these materials have had a previous life, from the yarn which was one of Helen's first uneven attempts when learning to spin, to fleece collected from fences around her home. The tweed comes from offcuts rescued from the Islay Woollen Mill, and the pearls are taken from a charity-shop find necklace.
Helen's nest is symbolic of the safe places we create for ourselves in life, with the materials we have available. When she watches small and secretive wrens burrowing into the undergrowth to build their homes, she thinks about how a home can take many forms, repurposing old, forgotten and "wasted" things to create a place of comfort.
