Ruth Packham Cardiganshire, United Kingdom
I am an artist/maker based in a small village on the West coast of Wales. I have been practicing for over 30 years. I work from a small studio at the back of my house. My surroundings are a constant source of inspiration to me; the colours of the expansive skies, the flocks of corvidae wheeling around and the flowers in the hedgerows. I work mostly with textiles.
Away from art education I began as a screen printer. Working, when I was able, using quick paper cut stencils on the kitchen table to create patterned fabric. I have always worked with what I have around me, preferring low tech processes and finding inspiration in the natural world. Mine has been a rural existence since moving to west Wales in 1994. The patterns and colours of flowers informed my later screen prints, using the macro photographs that I took, I made large scale images printed onto fabric. Textiles are my preferred medium, I have always stitched and made things from my printed fabric. I was introduced to felt making 15 years ago and was instantly mesmerised by the simplicity and potential of the process...I discovered the sculptor inside myself. I use British wool fibres to create my pieces, preferring Cambrian mountain wool when I can get it. Felt making gave me a new way to explore form, inspired by my love of plants and flowers and the challenge of learning new techniques. It also gave me new teaching and exhibiting opportunities and a way to meet a whole new group of makers.
There are limitations to my abilities as a felt maker, time, money and impatience all inhibit my ability to always realise my visual goals in wool. In lockdown I was given some money by a patron to make a painting....I insisted I wasn't a painter, but he saw potential that I did not. I have since become a painter. Realising some of my strange plant like visions in paint allows me the freedom to play with form and colour that I don't have as felt maker. Painting is somewhere where I can create my own visual realities...other worlds as a means of escapism.
In more recent years I have seen the importance of using my artist voice to highlight the issues of climate change and plastic pollution; parts of my work have become more politicised.
I continue to work with wool fibre, stitch and print AND I paint. I exhibit regularly and teach workshops.
