Cumbria Crack is supporting the recent expansion of the blue plaque scheme which will allow people up and down the country to nominate notable figures from their local area.
It had been confined to London but is set to be expanded so that buildings where local figures lived, worked or stayed will be marked with a blue plaque.
Cumberland is rich with people through the ages who have made their mark in many walks of life – from sport to entertainment, politics to business and the arts to science.
John Walsh has set the ball rolling with a suggestion from his former journalistic colleague Phil Cram of Audrey Walker, a Workington-born textile artist whose work is known world-wide.
Miss Walker, who died aged 92 in November 2020, spent the first 16 years of her life in Workington but never lived in the town after that.
She was perhaps born into textiles because her mother was a gifted dressmaker, rug-maker and all-round needlewoman.
Phil believes that if she had remained a painter (which she once was) and not followed her heart into textile art then her name would be up there in lights today alongside those of Bridget Riley, Tracey Emin, LS Lowry, David Hockney, Francis Bacon and any other contemporary British artist you’d care to name.
But as a fine art medium, textiles have neither the following nor the global appeal of paintings.
Yet her work hangs in private collections around the world, at the Victoria & Albert Museum, in St David’s Cathedral in Pembrokeshire, at The Embroiderers’ Guild (Discover Bucks Museum) and in the collections of many education authorities.
Phil says the first piece of her work he saw was the huge and magnificent tapestry, Monarchy 1000, which hangs in the Roman Pump Room in the city of Bath.
It commemorates the 1973 first millennium of the British monarchy and is one of many commissions which Audrey Walker undertook in her lifetime.
She left Workington for art college in 1944 – but regularly returned to visit friends and her widowed mother Jessie Walker (nee Sewell). Her dad Stanley, a brewery rep, died when she was just 12.
It was during one of these visits, around 1970 that Miss Walker had a conversation with the vicar of St John’s, which was the family church of the Walker family, and agreed to give up time to lead a group of amateur ladies of the church which became known as the St John’s Kneeler Group.
Miss Walker gave guidance (and guidance only) on design and technique. Her only stipulation was that every design must be unique and that no more than five colours of thread were to be used on each kneeler and the results were magnificent.
Audrey Walker’s career as an artist had its beginnings when she studied at Edinburgh College of Art and then at the famous Slade School in London (then and now the most prestigious art university in the world).
Her medium was paint and her work, especially portraiture, reached award-winning standards.
On graduation, she embarked on a career in teaching which lasted until 1988 when she retired as head of the department of textiles at Goldsmith’s, University of London.
It was during the 1960s that she made the switch from paint to textiles, but her work remained narrative-based, normally figurative – and never merely decorative.
Probably her finest work was done after retirement when she settled in Pembrokeshire and helped to found the celebrated Fishguard Arts Society.
It was with the society that she inspired a 30ft embroidery which commemorates the infamous (and short-lived) French raid on the Welsh coast in 1797.
And then, with fellow artist Eirian Short, she designed the famous Pembrokeshire Banner which celebrates Welsh history and culture and which hangs permanently in St David’s Cathedral.
Phil added: “I never personally met Audrey Walker but I feel that the scant recognition of her achievements which lingers today in West Cumbria is a crying shame. Sadly, she appears to have encountered the problem identified by the Gospel writer Luke that ‘no one is a prophet in their own land.’”
Let’s put that right with a blue plaque!
Who do you think should be nominated for a blue plaque in Cumbria? Let us know – email admin@cumbriacrack.com
