Beth Walsh

Beth began making lace at an evening class in the late eighties when she had three small boys to already keep her busy – it was to become a much more important part of her life than she ever anticipated. She went on to complete City and Guilds Lacemaking Parts I and II under the superb tutelage of Jane Rushworth Mackenzie.

 

She continues to use her experience of traditional lacemaking, both bobbin and needle lace, to create pieces exploring ideas such as three-dimensional construction, scale and colour.  The semi-transparent nature of lace is an aspect that she constantly exploits in her work, often placing lace against other media or by the deliberate use of shadows. In recent years she has had a fruitful collaboration with the ceramic artist Kate Vogler combining lace in various forms on vessels. Beth aims for a professional level of presentation in her work.

 

Her sources respond to direct sensory experience, particularly of landscape and other environments, music, art and literature. Influences include those initiated by her research into the late seventeenth-century representation of lace in a wide variety of media (PhD awarded in 2009 by UEA). Questions raised by these academic studies have transferred into her practice, particularly dealing with concepts of luxury, reality and identity in relationship to lace.

 

She uses traditional lace pillows and equipment when working at a ‘normal’ scale, but an easel, a large piece of polystyrene, nails and textile-factory pirns for larger pieces. Her work ranges from the intimate in scale, sometimes in the form of artists’ books, to pieces designed to be displayed in the vagaries of the weather. She has also used sound as an ‘accompaniment’. Threads vary from fine lacemaking gauges to thick linen, and she has recently begun to spin and dye her own yarns to further expand the possibilities.