About Sheila Blakeman-Shead

I have been involved with Art as student, teacher, lecturer and practising artist for all of my adult life.

I studied Fine Art at Wolverhampton, followed by a Post Graduate study in Art Education and Photography in London. I worked as a painter, printmaker and installation artist.

My passions are landscape and natural form, which I record photographically. The photographs are the source of my images.

In 2009 I started to experiment with Felting. I had always knit, dabbled in Spinning and Weaving, but fell in love with wool, afresh, as an expressive medium, after a chance encounter at a craft supplier. All those wonderful colours and textures fired my imagination.

The images I respond to are those of natural forms in which the abstract visual elements predominate. Whether this is the Lincolnshire landscape or the growth of plant forms, the flow of liquids or the layering and folding of rock formation. I am also fascinated by the interplay of surface and depth of water.

I like to play on a different level, with the duality of a piece as textured surface and the image as a window onto another space.

I work with a mixture of wet and needle felting. I take the visual elements of an image separately and produce a piece of felt for each. These are then collaged by needle felting onto a base of prefelt.

I have exhibited over the last few years in the area, mainly with CCN.