Anne Kelly’s gorgeous textural textiles are so full of detail, you see something new every time you look at them. I love how she often includes birds, insects and natural forms, interweaving the imagery together to make pieces that resemble memory boards, stories and the pages from a creative journal.

Kelly works in a similar way to how I work myself and like me, she has a penchant for a re-purposed material!  Vintage tea cloths, table linen, napkins and doilies make regular appearances, as well as paper dress patterns, photographs and other ephemeral bits and bobs.

 

Her pieces are layered and intensely worked and have similarities to the work of another artist of whose work I am a huge admirer – Mandy Patullo. I love how the observer can see the stitching and how the pieces are slightly wonky, showing how the fabrics that are used warp, as more stitch and different weights of detail is added in.

The work has many similarities to traditional Folk-Art pieces created in years gone by, by (mainly) women, creating beautiful things simply from what they had left over from other items – American traditional quilts, British and European samplers, Scandinavian knitted and woven textiles…I can see links with all of these in the work of this artist.

Kelly calls her work “Small Worlds” and it is easy to see why. The wealth of detail she includes means that the viewer needs to look and look again, to catch it all. I love her quirky butterflies and bees, looking like captured samples pinned on to a board by an avid collector from the 19th Century.

The piece below is my favourite by Kelly I think – it includes vintage embroidered table linen, it looks like the page from a nature lover’s journal or sketchbook and the colours are beautiful – subtle and muted for the most part. The way that it has been pieced together is lovely – it looks like a piece that has been added to over several years. I really love how Kelly’s own embroidery sits so beautifully alongside that which existed already on the linens that she has used.

Interesting and quirky, something for the natural historian, the diarist, the textile lover, the photographer – Kelly’s work encompasses them all. It is somewhere I return to again and again when in search of inspiration.