Lost in the Wood

Evie, final week of Helfa Gelf  Ooh, there's a lot going on at the moment and maybe the blog is feeling a bit neglected, so it's time to lavish a little attention on it and do a round up of a few things. Firstly, a brief consideration of two things coming to an end. September's Helfa Gelf art trail was a brilliant experience for me as I got a lot more exposure (the good, socially acceptable kind) than I could have achieved on my own, I met a lot of lovely people and got to see their reactions to my work. Predominantly this was amusement (Evie, mounted heads, squirrel in milk jug etc), delight (crochet cakes & rack of toast) or being slightly disturbed (also Evie/ woolidermy heads). I've written before about how much I enjoyed being with the other artists in our temporary studios (see recent previous posts) so I will not retread this happy ground but it was very entertaining and enjoyable and I would definitely recommend the experience to other artists thinking...

Needle Felted Bee Swarm Major excitement in the Lost in the Wood camp last week when my first proper exhibition piece was accepted in The Willow Gallery's 'Natural Selection' exhibition which opened on Saturday! There's some small changes and a few more bees have been added round the base but essentially it looks like this. Each bee was sculpted from merino tops fleece by hand using a barbed felting needle which is an enjoyable but fairly slow process, then they were layered up to create a busy swarm effect. I gave up trying to count the number of  bees that went into this piece. Trying to count them once I'd already fixed quite a few on was in hindsight a bit tricksy, it's over 100 at least. The dome is a piece of old lab equipment while the base is bespoke, made by a fantastic local wood artist John Roberts of Ogwen Art and Craft . In case you're wondering why the bees are unconventionally colourful, here's the artist statement that accompanies the...