Hebden Bridge Web

Saturday, 26 February 2022

Hebden Bridge Literary & Scientific Society, known locally as HB Lit & Sci, are very happy to announce that after an enforced break of two years we are starting again in-person lectures at Hebden Bridge Town Hall, and we are especially pleased that Kate Lycett will be coming to talk to us about her work.

Kate's lecture - Telling Stories: Painting a Narrative - will take place on Saturday 12th March at 7.30 pm. Tickets, £8 for adults and £5 for under 25s are on sale at the Town Hall or via our website. If you can't make it on the night then for £5 there will be the chance to watch a recording later.

More about Kate in her own words:

I grew up in Suffolk where the skies are vast and the land is low and flat. My grandad was an architect and he taught me the rudiments of technical drawing when I was 9. He made me a drawing board and a T square, and showed me how to sharpen a pencil with a knife.

I ventured north to York were I studied fine art at University (YSJ) and specialised in textile design. I had fun with pots of wax, resin, shiny fabrics and butterfly's wings. From there I spent a year in Huddersfield where I studied industrial applications and CAD; fewer butterflies, more Loom Sheds!

My first design job sat me in a sterile studio changing colourways of prints to match company logos and I was never allowed to get my hands dirty. I missed my fingers being permanently stained with Prussian blue, and so I started to paint again.

In 1999 I moved to Sheffield, and after a while I started to sell my work in galleries, and in the art and craft markets there. I made many great friends. I moved to Hebden Bridge in 2005

My textile design background is always present in the way that I paint and interpret what is around me. I see patterns in everything; the hills adorned with houses and washing lines, rows of flower pots and stripes of brightly painted drain pipes. Lines of gold thread trace lines through the landscape, and gold leaf changes the surface of my pictures with the changing light of day. I want to paint beautiful pictures of the places that I love. There are never people in my pictures but they're full of life and warmth.

Hebden Bridge is home and is part of who I am and what I do. I love the warmth, the colour and the community of where I live. I love that almost everyone I meet in the street can do or make something beautiful. It inspires much of my work and the longer I am here, the more I learn about the town, and so my work develops. There is such history here. I hear stories from the people who remember the town when it was black and industrial and those who remember the hedonistic hippy days. The house I live in has seen it all, and we're uncovering its histories as we pull up the floors and strip the walls.