Felt 12 (detail)

Sky Felt 12 1981 wool and fabric by Jenny Cowern (1943-2005).

This work was commissioned by Tullie House for the 1982 touring exhibition, Presences of Nature. Jenny Cowern described her felts in Crafts Magazine that year as “a dialogue between a new medium and a new subject. The desire to work in the medium came first, to look at the skies second. Excitement with looking at skies became foremost, their integration with felt became natural.”

Describing her work Cowern said: “My practice stems simply from an appreciation of what and how I see. Themes such as weather, light and reflections, water, garden growth all reflect my rural environment. Drawing and painting are the means of visual research and these interpretations of what I see enable me to develop pictorial compositions sometimes as more worked paintings in tempera and sometimes as felts. The characteristics of the drawing media used in the first studies, such as the close-packed lines of pastel, can often be of as much interest in the making of the final piece as the subject matter itself. The felts are made from wool fibres which I dye to obtain colour similar to the palette of a painter. The dyed fabrics are then mixed by hand-carding small quantities to achieve variations and graduations, or overlaid to achieve effects similar to washes; the fibre may also describe a line as in drawing. The hand felting process mats the fibres and therefore fixes the image in a compacted state. I have developed work in this medium since 1979.”

Jenny Cowern, who died in 2005, was one of Cumbria’s most distinguished visual artists, and one regarded with great affection in the region. Born Worcester, 1943, Cowern studied painting in Brighton then at the Royal College of Art in the 1960s before moving to Cumbria. Here she shared a studio with her long-term partner, the painter Raymond Higgs, until her death. Best known for her felt making, Jenny Cowern was a pioneer in introducing the practice into the UK. Her prolific output was, however, matched by her curiosity. Her work encompassed painting (including egg tempera), drawing, enamelling and architectural commissions, as well as felts. Light and reflection, growth and decay, beaches and tides, clouds and shadows were recurrent themes in her work, irrespective of medium. The artist was an acute observer of the natural world and its continual changes.

During her life, Jenny Cowern’s work was presented in numerous exhibitions at galleries in the UK, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, France and Germany. A major retrospective of her work, curated by Raymond Higgs, took place at Tullie House in 2007 to coincide with the publication of A Softer Landscape about the artist, co-written by Miss Mary Burkett OBE and Mrs Valerie Rickerby OBE.