All images are the copyright of Wendy Dolan and used with her permission. Copying or redistribution of this article without the expressed consent of the artist is prohibited.
We were pleased to welcome Wendy Dolan, a highly respected textile artist and educator from Sussex, UK, as our guest speaker. With more than 40 years of experience, Wendy teaches internationally through workshops, online courses, textile tours, and at the prestigious West Dean College. She is widely known for her innovative use of freehand machine embroidery, layered textiles, and her evocative work exploring place and memory through maps.
Wendy shared how her lifelong connection to textiles began in childhood with hand embroidery and dressmaking, later evolving through formal art and teaching training. After several years in primary education, she moved into adult education, where she has focused on developing a rich, texture-led practice inspired by landscapes, architecture, and nature.
At the heart of Wendy’s work is layering. She builds textured surfaces using mostly neutral fabrics—cottons, muslins, scrims, lace—combined with hand and machine stitching. Materials such as horticultural fleece, Lutradur, Expand-a-Print, and even scrunched tissue paper are used to create subtle depth and atmosphere. Colour is added sparingly using water-based, iron-fixed screen-printing pigments, valued for their versatility and the beautiful tonal variations created as different fabrics absorb colour in unique ways.
Maps became a central element in Wendy’s work around 2009, when she began incorporating historic, copyright-free maps into her textile landscapes. Using inkjet printing on treated fabric, these maps are layered, stitched, painted, and sometimes fragmented, becoming expressive markers of journeys, routes, and remembered places. Her In Place series celebrates meaningful locations—family homes, walking paths, wedding venues, holidays, landmarks, and architecture—transformed into tactile, story-rich artworks.
Through a wide range of examples, Wendy showed how deeply personal her commissions can be: running routes in Yorkshire, anniversaries in the Lake District, childhood homes near Hampton Court, weddings marked by churches, windmills, rivers, and iconic London imagery. Each piece begins with conversation and careful listening, translating memories into layered, stitched narratives.
Wendy also touched on larger-scale projects, including embroidered stage curtains for Royal Caribbean cruise ships and a major millennium wall hanging for Ashridge Management College, created collaboratively with fellow textile artist Jae Maries. These works demonstrate how her techniques adapt from intimate wall pieces to monumental installations.
She concluded by speaking about her ongoing teaching, international textile tours, workshops, and her recently reissued book, Layer, Paint and Stitch. Wendy’s talk was both inspiring and generous, offering fresh ways to think about maps, materials, and how textiles can beautifully capture the stories of place and personal history.
You may learn more about Wendy and her art practice by visiting her website here or visiting a YouTube video by Arnold’s Attic here.
Our many thanks to Wendy for sharing her time with us and inviting us to share in her artistic endeavours.