In 2013 Joke Lunsing made a decision. To be kind to herself. To focus on her own passion for a while.

During her recovery after a successful operation for a stomach, tumour Joke felt she had been given a second chance. She realised that she had been suppressing and ignoring her innate desire to work with hand stitch for more than 35 years!

In 2015 she started work on a textile project named The Felt Beehive both as a means of feeding her artistic instincts but also with the aim of raising awareness about the plight of bees. She collaborated with more than 50 others to create a 4.5-metre beehive covered with felt in just one year. When that project ended, she started experimenting with eco-printing and textile dyeing.

In 2017 Joke registered on TextileArtist.org’s online course Exploring Texture & Pattern with Sue Stone. But she didn’t find the early stages of the course easy.

Caroline Hyde-Brown’s fragile and beautiful texile art highlights the detailed craftsmanship of embroidery.

Her work uses a mixture of media materials, but with embroidery as the focus. She produces delicately constructed trees and sews in dried flowers. Her work draws upon nature, reflective light and the seasons. She aims for sustainability, creating artworks using natural dyes, papers and materials.

She trained in Fashion Design, gaining a BTEC in 1992, then completed a BA in Textile Design in Nottingham. She has been a freelance textile artist for over twenty years and has exhibited in the UK and overseas, most notably in Japan.

Teaching and travelling have always been an integral part of her work. Caroline finds great inspiration from the people she teaches and countries she has visited, including Japan, America, Morocco, the Caribbean, France and Greece. In 2002 she was selected to travel and work across the East and West coast of Japan, exhibiting her work alongside the Princess Diana Althorp Collection, as part of a British Craft promotional tour.

Caren Garfen is known for tackling tough topics. She juxtaposes seemingly simple textiles with complex issues like eating disorders to create compelling and informative installation art. Caren’s art does not hang neatly on a wall. Instead, she creates provocative examinations of issues that especially affect women.

Her latest installation art called ‘Room for Improvement’ is a classic example that exposes the overwhelming disparity between the need for and availability of services related to eating disorders in the UK. This ‘From conception to creation’ article gives you an inside look at how that work came to life, as well as introduces you to the considerations and techniques that go into ‘installation art’ in general.

Caren’s work has been exhibited widely in the UK and Europe, as well as Japan, United States, Canada and Australia. She recently received the prestigious Textile Society Development Award and has been a member of The 62 Group of Textile Artists since 2008.

Name of piece: Room for Improvement

Ann Vollum has been an artist for as long as she can remember. As a child, she loved to paint and make things from felt and fur.

But, although she had a yearning to study textile design, the adults in Ann’s life had different ideas.

Her teachers (at what she describes as a ‘horrendous and very snooty boarding school in England’) did not consider anything other than architecture a worthy pursuit for girls who showed an aptitude for the visual arts. And her mother was terrified that an art degree would lead to a life of poverty.

So, having been taught from an early age to tread the conventional path, Ann conformed and went to study Architecture at Newcastle University. She was ill-suited to the subject and ended up learning to be a graphic designer and art director on the job instead. Alongside this career, Ann continued to create art; painting in oil and acrylic, drawing in ink, combining the ink drawing with painted backgrounds.

2015 was very tough for Mary Carson. Early in the year, her beloved brother died from brain cancer and in December her mother passed away after suffering from Parkinson’s and dementia. Mary’s world was turned upside down and she struggled to escape her sad thoughts. That’s when she found sanctuary in stitching.

Mary had always been, in her own words, ‘a maker of sorts’ but hadn’t stitched in any dedicated fashion for nearly 40 years.

As a child, growing up in Milwaukee, Mary inherited a love of fabric from her seamstress grandmother. Then as a young woman in the 60s and 70s, Mary started sewing out of necessity; she is tall and at the time stores didn’t stock garments to fit her frame. But she started to resent having to make her own clothes and as soon as designs became available in her size, she walked away from sewing.

After a four-decade break, hand-stitching helped Mary find a sense of peace; the challenge of turning fabric and thread into visual stories provided a welcome distraction from her grief.