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, moving and thoroughly engaging.

Jacqui has a background in performance art, and this is clearly reflected in her work as a textile artist.

 

  


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 engage 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.

 

grief
   

In particular, she is preparing pieces that respond to the extraordinary autobiography 'A Cornish Waif's Story' published in 1954. Emma Smith [pseudonym] was, at the aged of 12, taken in to a home for destitute women where she worked in the laundry. Jacqui's studio is now situated in that same building where she stitches onto old, used sheets that have caressed bodies in times of both brokenness and ecstasy. Sheets that carry history; whose warp and weft have evidenced people, places and objects. Sheets already marked with loss resulting from constant use - holes, rips, tears and worn areas - some already repaired with darning and patches.

The new project LIFE, LOSS and LAUNDRIES includes small pieces about the size of handkerchief, up to a very large pieces, the size of a double bed sheet.

Since 2006, Jacqui has been working on cathedral exhibitions, and there are more in the pipeline.

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.


 

 

Web design R Arnold. Copyright ©2012 Jacqui Parkinson.