Tamsin Abbott

Tamsin Abbott completed a degree in English literature (First Class Honours) at Stirling University (1985 -1989) where she specialised in medieval literature. Her love of the language and stories of medieval literature was enhanced by the fact that much of the research material she was reading was illustrated with paintings and simple woodcuts of the period.

After leaving university Tamsin moved to Herefordshire and returned to college to complete a foundation year in art at Gloucester College of Art and Technology where she discovered the highly influential work of the Brotherhood of Ruralists. In 1999 she began an evening class in stained glass at Hereford College of Art and Design and soon gained an OCN in the craft but continued the course for a total of four years.

Tamsin works from her studio in the Herefordshire countryside where the orchards, the hills, the woods and all the plants, birds and animals influence her work.

LATEST WORK FOR ‘PATTERNS OF FRIENDSHIP’ EXHIBITION

The story is too long to relate here, of how Ann and Graham Arnold became part of my life and how I came to know them first through their work; through a book that gave me great joy and hope to know that there were serious artists like them alive in the world at that time. Through great fortune, and the building that is now the Twenty Twenty Gallery, I came to know them in person and was enchanted by them. I still am.

These small pieces of my work are a tribute to them and their lives lived in a secret valley in the Shropshire hills. In them I have tried to capture some of that elation that I felt there myself, a real and imagined version of them.

In this period of lockdown some of us have been lucky enough to reap the benefits of a quieter, cleaner, and more contemplative world. This was the world that Graham and Ann sought for themselves. Perhaps we can make more effort to keep things this way so that the enchantment of the natural world will be there for generations to come?