Helen M. Stevens was born in Belmont, Surrey, her early years spent travelling with her father in the RAF. Later educated at The County Grammar School, Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk she studied the history of textiles and design informally during her early secretarial career.
She has exhibited widely, both in one woman exhibitions at a variety of venues and with the Society of Women Artists, initially at the Westminster Gallery and more recently the Mall Galleries in London.
Other early venues included the Harrods Art Gallery, the Stanley Gibbons Gallery in the Strand, The Mary Rose exhibition, The British Museum “Making of England” and the Palace of Westminster and Olympic Park in Sydney, Australia.
IN HER OWN WORDS
In the many years since I first “gave up the day job” and became a professional art embroiderer – two questions have been put to me over and over again: where do I get my inspiration and where did I train? Both have simple answers: everywhere and nowhere!
As a child I had always been fascinated by thread. Where did that come from? I shall never know; it was something deep inside me. My first awareness of thread is a strange memory: the family were in transit quarters returning from an overseas tour to the USA. I must have been around 5 years old and was bored! From somewhere my father found a huge tangled mass of knitting wool. He sat with me and helped me find a loose end – then began to wind it into a traditional ball (he said his mother had taught him how to do it!).
It took me days to unravel that knotted mess, but when I had, there was a huge, magnificent ball of wool ready for … I knew not what, nor whatever happened to it during the homeward voyage on the old Cunard Queen Elizabeth, but somehow it had entwined itself around my heart and soul.
Within a short time I was begging bits of felt and cotton and making elementary stitches – my mother still treasures some odd little keepsakes including a square handkerchief-holder neatly cross-stitched – but already boring to my way of thinking.
My real love of design, colour and creativity came at a primary school at which a lady arrived once a week with a huge carpetbag of fabric scraps and silk threads. Like some marvellous Dickensian archetype she would upend it all on a table, crying “There, my dears, just enjoy!” And I did!
The embroidery world was very different then. The easy course would have been to go along the “craft” road – there is always a ready market for cushion covers and tray cloths – but it was the “art” scene that appealed. For some years small art shows, provincial exhibitions, and sheer determination kept me on course. Then came a break through.
After a commission for a limited edition of works for the Mary Rose Trust, an exhibition at the Harrods Art Gallery followed, and, suddenly, recognition. A series of magazine articles about my work captured the imagination of the public and my then potential publishers – and my first book,
The Embroiderers’ Countryside, was born. I exhibited my research on Anglo Saxon embroidery at the British Museum, was commissioned to work for the House of Commons Works of Art Committee, had a picture unveiled by H. M. The Queen, and was elected a member of the Society of Women Artists.
And all this without ever a lesson in embroidery or art! But not without study … my days were filled with medieval Latin descriptions of embroidered work, my evenings with experimentation.
A succession of books followed, now virtually all reprinted in both hardback and softback, many in overseas editions and some even translated in Russian:
The Embroiderers Countryside
The Embroiderers Country Album
The Timeless Art of Embroidery
The Myth and Magic of Embroidery
Helen M. Stevens’ World of Embroidery
Helen M. Stevens’ Embroiderer’s Year
and the Masterclass Series:
Embroidered Flowers, Butterflies, Birds, Animals, Gardens and Landscapes.
Since then things have diversified widely. My designs are now the subject of fine art greetings cards, printed fabrics, cottons, silks and as the basis for home furnishings and fashion.
Where next? Who can say?
Helen M. Stevens - 2008
Whatever! I do!!