East to East: Art and Craft with an Asian Influence

Helen Derbyshire’s work is about the textures and mood of the landscape around her – focusing sometimes on the details of vegetation and sometimes on evoking a sense of the season, of space, light and weather. She draws and uses digital photography, in combination with experimental textile and mixed media approaches, drawing on and referencing domestic sewing skills and traditions.

Traditional Japanese brush-painted and woodcut landscapes have always provided an inspiration - in their reverence for nature, their sense of light and space, and their focus on the beauty of simple natural forms. The Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi also strongly resonates with its appreciation of transience and imperfection.  Helen’s work focuses not on conventional picturesque views of the landscape, but on finding beauty in the ordinary and everyday - the simple bark of a tree or overgrown hedgerow.  Helen’s colour palette and heavily worked surfaces - stitched, darned and patched - evoke the passage of time, the cycle of growth and decay, and the beauty to be found in impermanence and imperfection.  

Helen’s work in this show is inspired by the landscape of the Waveney Valley - the borderland between Norfolk and Suffolk. This marshy landscape is shifting and uncertain – in some ways unchanged over centuries and yet constantly transformed by rhythms of the tides and the seasons. Her pieces, painstakingly pieced together from delicate tissue paper images and transformed through stitch, evoke the texture and space of this landscape in its peaceful fragile beauty.

VIEW MORE OF HELEN'S WORK ONLINE