Lou knitting inside Life/Blood, her installation of red knitting at Dore Abbey, Herefordshire,
for Art and Christianity's Vessel: an art trail in 7 remote rural churches, Aug -Oct. 2024
Photo: Mud and Thunder (Click for full image)
Lou describes becoming an artist as a very positive form of mid-life crisis. When her only child went into the sixth form, Lou decided that she needed something to focus on, other than her work as a teacher, so she enrolled on an Art Foundation course at Bristol School of Art. There she quickly realised that the knitting and stitching skills she took for granted transferred readily to making sculpture.... and she was hooked!
She went on to do a BA in Drawing and Applied Arts at the University of the West of England, (UWE) in Bristol. She graduated, with First Class Honours, in 2015 and was awarded the Embroiderers’ Guild Scholarship (Over 30s) in her final year.
During her degree she continued to teach but in her final year she left teaching to focus on her art. After graduating, she exhibited in London with a collective of her peers, Synecdoche, and then often with them in Bristol until 2020.
In 2019, her 60th year, she started an MA in Fine Art at Bath Spa University (BSU). She graduated with Distinction in 2021. During her MA she was awarded BSU’s Harbutt Fund, for Social Knitwork 2021. For details of her MA research please visit her MA Fine Art research website.
Since then she has been selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2022, for The Holburne Open with seam collective and she was awarded a year’s residency at BSU’s Graduate scheme, EMERGE for 2022-23. She was selected for the Dreamtime Fellowship 2023-24, a year's residency in a shared studio at Spike Island, Bristol sponsored by Luke Jerram. She has just completed the New Platform Art Professional Development Programme for 2024-25.
Over the past 10 years, she has exhibited widely and has undertaken a number of commissions, residencies and socially engaged projects. Notably, she was part of two Arts Council-funded exhibition tours in 2023/24, one with Social Scaffolding and the other, A Visible THREAD, with seam collective. In 2024, she collaborated with Oly Bliss on two commissions, as Baker & Bliss. They developed Glowing and Growing, a largescale, glow-in-the-dark immersive and interactive installation, firstly for Severn Arts for Light Night, Worcester in February and then for Enlighten, in Accrington, Lancashire in October.
Have a look at Lou's Portfolio, CV and Exhibitions pages. For details of work created before 2019, please visit her Archive.
Very aware of the wellbeing benefits of making art, she is interested in art as therapy, for herself but also for others. She volunteered for a couple of years at Southmead hospital with Fresh Arts, facilitating art sessions for elderly patients with dementia. She’s been involved with some research into Arts on Referral too, delivering sessions for other patient groups for wellbeing. She also helped to organise a series of 6 exhibitions with Synecdoche in the main hospital atrium from 2016-2018.
She’s still actively involved in seam collective who have another ambitious project planned for August 2025. Watch this space!
March 2025