This project is about what happened on the residency I did at Mawddach in May/June 2022 with fellow HB Drawing artists, Ruth Richmond and Janine Hall and two incidental experiences which have had a long term impact on my practice and which have led to a way of working with drawing and felt together that had previously eluded me.

The two parts of my practice have many differences in terms of materials and of my skills and experience. In making these works, for the first time, I am finding ways to move between them and to transfer ideas between media.

The first thing that has stayed with me from the residency was a realisation I had when I went to retrace part of the route to the Arthog waterfalls, to check the location of some reed beds that interested me. In fact, I rather lost interest in the reed beds but this thought that suddenly came into my head as I walked: that this was the first time I had ever really been alone, walking, in the countryside.

I had been for country walks before; I had stayed in cottages literally in the middle of a field more than once and had to walk everywhere; but there had always been someone else there. I walk a lot on my own as part of my daily life but that is in town where there is a structure, I’m usually heading somewhere in particular and you are very rarely alone. But here I was for the first time just wandering alone. And it was fine. It was more than fine.

Since then, I have found myself feeling much more comfortable wandering in places I don’t know and that has opened up all kinds of new experience of place.

The second thing that happened was that I tried ‘walking and drawing’. At first I didn’t really know what I was trying to record and I kept trying to find the right colour of pencil in my case. The results were … not a record of anything very much. Then one day, walking across Barmouth Viaduct, I decided to stop looking for the ‘right’ colour and just pull out a pencil and draw. I liked that better. Realistic colour did not matter. Next, I was walking in Arthog Bog and I stopped trying to ‘draw’ anything – there was just too much to draw and it kept changing as I walked – and just made layers of marks. And there at last was a drawing that captured something of what it felt like to be in amongst the trees and flowers.

When I think about being immersed in a place or space, I often imagine that feeling translated into felt, into something you literally walk into or wrap around yourself. And I made a trial piece using strips of coloured fibre to mimic the drawings. It has some interesting qualities but I was thinking about something on a much bigger scale and that would mean giving serious thought to how to scale up; how to make something robust enough to hang and maybe walk through but with space and air through it.

None of these is insoluble but somehow the idea languished until I decided to go back to my drawings.

The originals are in a small sketchbook, the double spread being 15 x 21 cm. I had 3 or 4 drawings of several walks around the residency and I started to redraw them one on top of another about A3 size using oil pastels and Woodie crayons to capture the bold bright marks. That brought out the different qualities of place: in the Bog, along the Mawddach Trail, walking down the estuary and over to Barmouth or along the railway line towards Fairbourne. And those qualities in turn suggested different ways of interpreting the drawings in fibre, which I did largely using leftovers from my stash.

These are the drawings of Arthog Bog that led to the sample at the top of this post.

These are the drawings of Arthog Bog that led to the sample at the top of this post. The first three were not conveying what I wanted so I ended up collaging the remnants into the drawing at bottom R. That immediately related to the way I often make felt with leftovers. I’m still hankering after doing a very large piece and this might be the start of that.

And here are the drawings of the route along the estuary and over to Barmouth:

and the small sample felt that resulted, another collage of leftovers with some more definite mark making:

My recollection of walking along the railway line was the wind whipping off the sea and blowing sand horizontally. The layered drawings just weren’t doing what I wanted and it occurred to me that weaving, commonplace though it has become, could produce a blurring that I hoped would create the right feeling. And adding another layer of over-drawing, as at the bottom right, reinstated some of the linear structure.

I decided not to weave the felt, which I thought would be too bulky, but instead to create two versions, superimpose them, cut them into squares and then alternate the squares. That method creates two cut-and-pieced felts, which then each had an overdrawing in thread. I’m still thinking about the balance between the cut-and-piece element and the over-drawing.

Lastly, I wanted to try something different for the drawings of my walks along the Mawddach Trail and the woods alongside. Again, the layered drawings and the collage were OK but a layer of drawing on tracing paper produced a sense of veiling and concealment which reflects something of the woods. I haven’t yet translated that into felt.