Jilly Edwards: Nature Table
For a year, Jilly Edwards worked from a garden table that wobbled every time she leaned on it. Her house and studio were mid-refurbishment, so this rickety surface became her only fixed point, and everything she gathered nearby went onto it: leaves, flowers, fir cones, twigs, sweet wrappers, bottle tops. The ordinary debris of a life lived outdoors and half indoors at once.
Portrait of Jilly Edwards with 'Nature Table'
That accumulation forms the starting point for Nature Table, Edwards' new exhibition at 8 Holland Street's Bath Gallery, running until 22 August. It brings together 52 handwoven tapestries alongside several larger works, and the scale of the show mirrors the discipline behind it. Each week, Edwards recorded her collected fragments in small handmade sketchbooks, drawing and painting them before her home was ready to receive her back. By the time she moved in, she had a year of studies waiting to become something else, a whole calendar of small observations stacked up like kindling.
Jilly Edwards, Nature Table - Winter Stems. Cotton, wool and linen yarns.
H13.5 x W13.5 cm (framed dimensions).
Weaving, for Edwards, was the way she processed that period. She set herself a simple rule: one tapestry a week, each matching the size of its source drawing. The early pieces read as modest sampling strips, testing colour and yarn against the sketchbook pages. As the weeks went on, the weavings grew more animated, more willing to depart from their references and find their own rhythm on the loom.
Jilly Edwards, Nature Table - Dark Time. Cotton, wool and linen yarns. H13.5 x W13.5 cm (framed dimensions).
Seen together, the 52 tapestries read like a diary, tracking a slow shift from disorientation towards something steadier. That arc continues in Cloud Hedges and Stones, a larger piece Edwards made after the smaller works were finished. She describes it as emerging from a difficult stretch, and its first impression is darker and more brooding than the rest of the show. Look longer, though, and her familiar colour sense reasserts itself, threading through the shadows like a memory refusing to stay buried.
Jilly Edwards, Nature Table - The Ploughed Fields. Cotton, wool and linen yarns
H13.5 x W13.5 cm (framed dimensions).
Edwards has been exhibiting and teaching since the early 1970s, including a period at Edinburgh College of Art's tapestry department in the 1980s, and her work sits in the permanent collections of the Whitworth and the V&A, alongside a commission for Newnham College. What Nature Table adds to that history is a rare look at process laid bare: the drawings, the weekly discipline, the table itself standing in for a year without a settled home, and the patience it took to turn that unsettled stretch into work worth exhibiting.
Jilly Edwards, Nature Table - exhibition installation.
As Edwards puts it, she is drawn to "glimpses and moments," using landscape as a source of colour, texture and memory. Nature Table gives readers 52 chances to see exactly what she means.
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Further Information:
Jilly Edwards, Nature Table, is on show now at 8 Holland Street's Bath Gallery, running until 22 August.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Jilly Edwards, Nature Table - Making the Whole Garden Different. Cotton, Wool and Linen Yarns. H13.5 x W13.5 cm (framed dimensions).
All images courtesy of 8 Holland Street Gallery, and as credited in captions.