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There are two main strands to this video report. This leading British textile artist and teacher is seen first, working in the Design Department of the University of Huddersfield at the end of a year-long residency there, making long lengths of needle felt on a big industrial machine and then piecing and layering them before combining them on a needle punch machine several times, to produce large, powerful, colourful, landscape-like hangings.

She is then seen in her studio in Spain, working with the needle felt and other fabrics with machine and hand sewing to produce rich hand felted pieces concerned with environmental issues of use and misuse - of land, of water, of tourism.

Common to both these strands are the parallel studies that this artist has been following at the John Innes Centre, Norwich in aspects of nature, plants, structures and particularly the practice and theory of sowing mechanically or by hand.

The theme Sow/Sew is the culmination of all these applications. It is about intervention in the landscape and also in the construction, design and transformation of textiles. In this sense it revives earlier art issues of the rigour of geometry and mechanics in production and mark making, versus or plus the freedom of manipulation, expression and choice.

The beauty of needlefelt is its ability to appear both solid or transparent, depending on the light source. When I'm working with layers, I often feel the thickness of the cloth. It can vary depending how carefully you put the fibres in the machine. I do not mind some thin patches because it allows the colours underneath to show through more. The hand mark ways of mixing and preparing fibres for the machine are in sharp contrast to the flat areas of colour mixing that the machine creates.

Jeanette Appleton
Lives and works in Spain

The principle element of the work is felt, a material with direct connection with the nomad and land.

Exploring the spatial effects of colour with dyed wool and the distortion of printed or stitched marks on various fabrics. Travelling to many different environments and cultures inform my ideas, from the rural wilderness in Mongolia to Japanese urban rituals. Evoking a visual memory of the untouchable perspective of land areas and layers of eroded history.