Introducing Jacqui's work
Jacqui's work catches the eye and challenges the mind. It's all about putting ideas into action, exploiting many materials and techniques in order to get a message across.
She uses a powerful graphic instinct together with the intimacy of the hand-stitched line to create work that feels highly spontaneous, very lively or moving and thoroughly engaging.
Jacqui has a background in performance art, and this is clearly reflected in her work as a textile artist. You sense her love of the spectacular and feel the drama in many of her pieces. She is also fascinated by intricate and personal work involving words, images and objects.
Her Christian faith underpins all her art. She often includes words, sometimes precise extracts from the bible, or words that sum up ideas and feelings to form part of a graphic narrative and to draw the viewer in.
You can enjoy the big picture and the tiny detail. Often her pieces have great impact from a distance; then they engages the viewer, and encourage close inspection and contemplation.
New directions
Following the death of her first husband Rob Frost from cancer in 2007, Jacqui's work has seen a great change in style. First, she expressed her grief through small scale, delicate, hand-stitched handkerchiefs, to reveal graphically her personal thoughts and feelings. These have formed the basis of an exhibition which will be touring England - Good grief?
From this she started to examine issues of loss in people's lives, and to find ways of expressing loss, love and hope in her new work. Encouraged by the rigorous criticism which she has received as part of a specialist PhD course for practising artists, at the University of Plymouth, she is exploring new artistic routes.
She is curently working on a series inspired by the traditions of women's work in mending and laundering in Victorian and Edwardian time. In particular, she is preparing pieces that respond to the extraordinary "Story of a Cornish Waif", an autobiography published in 1954 under the pseudonym of "Emma Smith". At the age of 12, "Emma" was taken in to a home for destitute women. She worked in the laundry. By coincidence, Jacqui's studio is situated that very laundry building.
The new work for LIFE, LOSS and LAUNDRIES includes small pieces about the size of handkerchief, up to a very large piece, the size of a double bedsheet.
Jacqui is still working on more screens for cathedral exhibitions. They have always been very different from one another, and the same will be true of the next displays, which see new use of vibrant colour and materials.