An Essex girl through and through, Janette joined EAST in 2003 and is currently the group's secretary and web designer.
As well as being a member of EAST, Janette is very involved with several Essex based textile groups including the Chelmsford branch of the Embroiderer’s Guild where she has held several of the committee posts, including chairman. Janette also belongs to the Billericay branch of the Essex Handicrafts Association and the newly formed Eastern Regional Textile Forum (and until recently was the Essex representative for the group).
Even from an early age Janette was a girl who wanted to "make things". Her maternal grandmother was a needlewoman by occupation and her mother and sister are also great crafters. Janette particularly enjoys hand stitching, beading, book making and doll making - all skills she utilizes in her textile work for EAST. Janette's other great interest is history - family history and social history.
For her first exhibition with EAST, "Spirit of the Cloth", Janette made a set of four dolls, each one representing one of her grandmothers or maternal great grandmothers. The fabric for each doll was dyed then hand stitched with symbols relating to the life of each relative. A felt, handmade book accompanied the dolls, giving additional information about the way women's lives have changed since the time of Janette’s relatives in the late 19th century. The book subsequently sold to a private collector.
In the next exhibition, "Stitched Up", Janette moved on to a wider topic. Remembering a television programme about Thomas Coram and the Foundling Hospital in London, she decided to visit the newly opened Foundling Museum, in particular to see the 18th century tokens - small items left by a parent to identify a child when it was placed at the hospital. The resulting pieces for the EAST exhibition were a response to the research Janette had started at the Foundling archive. Janette is now a leading authority on the subject of foundling tokens and as well as giving talks on the subject, has contributed to the research for the highly successful and emotive exhibition, Threads of Feeling at the Foundling Museum that ran at the museum in 2010/2011. She has co-authored a small book on the subject of the tokens. "An Introductory Guide to the Tokens of the London Foundling Museum" is now available at the Foundling Museum (www.foundlingmuseum.org.uk for more information).
When EAST decided to research the Warner Textile Archive as a group project, Janette endeavoured to find something from the 18th century so that it would link into her historical research. Fortunately the archive contains textiles from this period, which the Warner designers used to inspire their own new ideas.
"In "Talking Textiles" I looked at the lives of two mothers, both who left two boys at the Foundling Hospital in the 18th century. Margaret Larney - a poor woman who ended up being executed for the crime of coining, and "the peer's daughter" an anonymous but wealthy woman who secretly gave up twin boys in order to preserve her "respectability". Although their position in life was almost exact opposites they both needed the Foundling Hospital to protect their infants. The mother's story is something that is less often known than that of the children."
In "Making a Point!" I have moved on to more general research into the eighteen century and the Age of Enlightenment when public museums were emerging from private collections, people of all classes were looking at the world differently and making changes in the way they lived their lives. As always I am particularly interested in women during this time including Mary Delaney, Caroline Herschel, Mary Prince, Olympe de Gouges.
Lectures:
"The tokens and textiles of the foundling hospital archives" - a talk about the 18th century tokens and how they are used to inspire my own contemporary work; this talk can be adjusted so that it has either a more historical or textile bias.
