Judith Roberts has been active in the Shepparton textile art scene for over fifteen years, regularly participating in group exhibitions with Shepparton Textile Artists (STA). She has also mounted successful solo and joint exhibitions (with Kerry Handwerk) in Echuca and Kyabram. Judith also runs Tactile Textiles, a twice-monthly workshop group, from her home studio.
A self-taught artist, Judith has expanded her repertoire of techniques, materials, and forms through reading, experimenting, and attending many workshops with internationally-recognised tutors.
Judith thrives on diversity – of form, scale, materials, and techniques – yet her works, whilst visually diverse, explore common themes. Many celebrate nature and express concern for the environment. She favours natural processes, including eco-printing, natural dyeing, and ink-making. Embracing the wabi sabi tradition, she chooses the worn, the tattered, the second-hand, and the home-made when assembling materials to work with.
Many of Judith works feature one or more of her ‘signature elements’: buttonhole stitch rings; hand-twisted fabric cords; wrapped fabric beads; handstitched ‘slips’ (made from layered fabrics and papers, and applied to larger works).
Though she is capable of working with restraint, Judith Roberts’s art is more often exuberant – you see not only the maker’s hand in the work, but also her joy in the making.
