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Wendy Farquharson
Wendy’s lifelong love for art has more recently evolved into a textile art practice, where she uses a combination of wet felting, hand stitching, and machine embroidery as her 'painting' technique to create vibrant and evocative land and seascapes.
Perthshire born and now based in Glendoick in Eastern Perthshire, Wendy works under the name ‘Escape Textile Art’, a name that reflects her hope for viewers to momentarily pause and connect with her work.
Aesthetic
Inspired by Scotland’s glens, forests, highlands, and untouched coastlines, Wendy expresses every sensory experience in her work through a vivid interaction of colour and texture. Whether it’s the vibrant hues of wildflowers beneath big open skies, the salty tang of sea air along the shore, or the earthy scent of an ancient woodland, every sight, sound, scent, taste, and feeling becomes part of her creative palette - woven thoughtfully into each of her wool paintings.
Colour and texture define Wendy’s artistic style, her carefully chosen natural materials allow her to build depth and a tactile richness in her work, resulting in a painterly quality unique to this process.
Practice
Every piece starts with a location. Wendy captures her own experience by taking lots of photographs and making detailed notes, documenting the atmosphere, colours, scents, textures and emotions the setting evokes.
Back in the studio, her impressions are gathered into a mood board that helps her explore ideas and inspirations. Compositions are then sketched out using chalk pastels - her first step toward bringing it to life in wool and stitch. Wendy then selects the merino wool, silk and other fibres, often carding and blending to create the colours needed. The felt painting process begins by laying these down to resemble her sketches and photos. The materials are sprayed wet with hot soapy water which opens the wool fibres allowing them to easily bond. Once soaked, they are agitated through a combination of rubbing, rolling and pressing, causing the wool to interlock and shrink, turning the layers into a solid fabric. The piece is rinsed, shaped and air dried before adding details with hand and machine embroidery.
In addition to small and large framed paintings, Wendy creates felted book covers and bags and occasionally runs workshops to share her favoured technique.
Location & Links
Glendoick
