Guildhall 2025, Textiles

Talented textile artists are set to weave a delight for visitors at the Guildhall in Bury St Edmunds, opening this Friday. Their work brings together colour, texture, and storytelling — a celebration of craftsmanship that spans embroidery, weaving, batik, felting, and sustainable fashion. 

 

Liz Chester, a professional tapestry weaver since 2007, produces intricate works whose rhythm and colour reflect the meditative nature of her craft. Jean Constantine hand-felts charming depictions of Suffolk’s birds and animals, adding delicate embroidery to enhance their detail and personality. Helen Dougall captures the essence of landscape and seascape through batik, layering wax and dye to create painterly scenes of clouds, fields, and shoreline textures. Jean Fryer’s luminous silk and chiffon panels glow with light and colour, often digitally printed and finely embroidered to evoke the softness of watercolour. 

 

Jenny Nutbeam paints and dyes velvet, silk, and linen to produce one-of-a-kind scarves and jackets influenced by Japanese design and the Suffolk coast, guided by a sustainable, no-waste ethos. 

Jo Rolfe draws inspiration from East Anglia’s land and sea, creating screen-printed and stitched textile works from natural and upcycled fabrics, often referencing rural crafts such as sail-making and thatching. Chloe Scott, a woven designer based in Norwich, hand-dyes and weaves wool and cotton into bespoke fabrics inspired by nature and architecture, while Mary Jane Toulson creates striking, one-off wool rugs “paintings for the floor” that blend bold colour with geometric form. Danielle Wade is inspired by the natural world, where her bold linear drawings and photographic techniques are translated onto hand-dyed cottons, linens, silks and specialist fabrics, layered with richly coloured textile prints and embroidery to create vibrant, functional pieces such as cushions, aprons, and everyday bags. 

 

Together, these artists showcase the beauty and diversity of contemporary textile art — a vibrant celebration of creativity and craftsmanship not to be missed at the Guildhall this winter. We look forward to welcoming you this Friday. More information available here >>