Elizabeth-Jane Grose - Open Studios

Images and textiles from farm life: plants and birds in charcoal and botanical watercolour; textiles and sculpture using wool from the artist’s sheep.

Elizabeth-Jane Grose is an artist embedded in her surroundings. Her work is a record of a small patch of rural life. She keeps a small flock of rare breed and native sheep on a North Cornwall small-holding. The artist started experimenting with using the sheep’s wool in her work and has created a wide variety of textiles, from sculpture and wall hangings to ‘living sheep’ or ‘vegetarian’ fleeces – a way of processing a fleece from a shorn sheep which creates a rug where the skin stays on the living sheep.

Her work flows effortlessly between art and craft. She has always been interested in process, and the way things are made or drawn, and applies this to the natural world that she inhabits. Other work on show includes detailed botanical watercolours, an art form directly descended from the Florilegia and herbals of the 15th Century, created from careful observation of plants growing on and near her holding. Examples of this facet of her practice are now in the collection of the Eden Project Florilegium.

Twenty Years of walking the Cornish Coast finds its way into large scale works, Living Landscapes, in these works the artist layers carded strands of wool from her flock’s fleeces, dyed with plants from her holding, including ash, willow, nettle, and woad. Over the millennia, sheep have been instrumental in creating both the flora and aspect of the Cornish landscape. The wool from which these works were created includes that from breeds descended from those brought by early invaders and traders, adding a human and pre-historical echo to these expressions of geological time.

Many of the plants she paints are also used to create natural dyes for her wool work. There are also pen and ink studies of life on the small holding – such as the story of a crow who stole duck eggs in ‘ The Future’s Thief’; expressive, larger drawings of birds on the camel estuary: detailed charcoal tonal studies of her sheep and birds: and ‘living sheep’ fleece and peg-loom rugs.