Jean Spence

Textiles, lino printing. painting.

www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1376886472

spenceaungle and jeanspence32

I have always been interested in the arts, but it was not until I joined Edan in 2008 that I began to consider seriously how I might develop my own creative practice.

Previously, as a youth and community work practitioner and university lecturer I had been involved in community arts, and I continue to be interested in the potential of the arts within informal education and community development work.

I joined Edan on the basis of my interest in creative writing and photography, but my contact with other Edan artists encouraged me to think about how I might use other skills and interests more creatively.

These included everything from the knitting and embroidery I learned as a child, through my interest in local landscape and wild flowers, to my knowledge of historical and social research methods. Through Edan I have also learned to use other media such as calligraphy, collage, and lino printing. I have become particularly interested in lino printing and textiles.

Art for me is primarily a means of communicating and connecting with others. I want my finished pieces to say something about how I see and understand the world. I want them to include ideas and perhaps contain different layers of meaning, but I don’t want the work to be difficult or obscure. It makes me happy if the viewer identifies with what I have done and I am especially happy if some reflection and conversation emerges from that.

I post images of my art work on one of my Instagram pages: look for SpenceAungle.

I post photographs on the other Instagram page: Jean Spence32

I also have Facebook page which includes art work and photography https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1376886472

Blast beach reflections

Elusive Moon

Pull of the moon

Elemental Power, Dawdon

Still She Rises

Moondance

As year ends

Only dreaming

I'll Meet You There

Time and Tide

Pool

15th May 2025 Preparing work for the Pool exhibition in the EDAN Gallery, as usual, my deeper thoughts about the meanings rovoked by the title start to emerge as the deadline draws closer. So having started thinking simply about rock pools, I have progressed to making connections between the work I am making and the crab die-off focused on the Tees estuary in 2021. So what began as an innocent textile with a lino-printed crab as the central motif, has now become a question about the death of the crabs and our role in the pollution of the seas upon which we depend. I was already considering the pollution from the mine workings that have led to the red polluted pools on the Blast Beach and have begun a lino print dealing with that, but it probably wont be completed in time for the Pool exhibition, especially as the arthritis in my fingers is slowing progress. Last night I went to see a performance of Bertolt Brecht Mother Courage and Her Children by Ensemble 84, at Horden Methodist Church. Members of Isango Ensemble from South Africa and local actors produced and created the piece as translated by Lee Hall. To say it was brilliant is almost an understatement. The audience was completely drawn into it. What a powerful and moving indictment of war. Today, I glanced at a textile that I made for EDANs 2014 exhibition commemorating the outbreak of WW!, and I realised that it depicted pools of blood and mud. I am therefore determined to submit it to the exhibition with some adaptations to the text and maybe to the stitching. I shall use Bob Dylans lines from Every Grain of Sand. When the pool of tears beneath my feet floods every new born seed