It was so exciting to get back together again after months of Zoom meetings and textile artist and printmaker, Wendy Lloyd from Newbury spoke to a group of 40 members about “My Inspiration”. She also brought a wonderful selection of cards and prints for members to buy.

Wendy explained that her mother was a textile artist and she had done A Level art at school but had gone on to read English at University. It was not until she went to Dubai that she went back to textiles.

On her return to the UK, she was inspired to enrol on a City and Guilds Machine Embroidery course by an exhibition at her local college. One of her C&G projects focused on spiral-inspired felted accessories.

Landscapes have always influenced her work and Wendy showed us examples of patterns and colours which she had taken from an image of the desert in Oman and the golden dome of a mosque. Her aim is always to interpret rather than just reproduce an image. Wendy’s ‘Landscape Impressions’ class looks at aspects of this and she showed an example of how colours can be altered to change the mood of a landscape.

Wendy got involved with a hanging for Newbury Library where people were asked to imagine the town in 2099. She also led workshops on the interpretation of children’s’ drawings. We were shown examples of thermofax screen printing and mono printing using tissue and collage over print.

In 2015 Wendy created her ‘Journey’ series featuring contour lines.

Wendy created two pictures as a result of lockdown. One was entitled, “Bound” and showed someone tied down and it was dark and gloomy and the other was “Unbound” showing someone released looking towards open space.

Recently Wendy’s work has included abstract images as well as landscape and she is trying to create more crossover between her textile and print work. She is currently developing a collagraph class for textile artists.