Evocative artwork for Bodmin's Flamm festival by local artist - Elizabeth-Jane Grose

One of our local artists, Elizabeth-Jane Grose is creating a spectacular installation in the Soldiers Chapel in St Petrocs Church for the Flamm Festival being held in Bodmin on the 28th February and 1st March 2026. We highly recommend that you stop by St Petroc's Church to see this unique and powerfully evocative artwork.

Working out of a resurrected wagon house on a 6-acre holding overlooking the Camel Estuary in North Cornwall, Elizabeth-Jane is an artist embedded in her surroundings. Her work is a record of a small patch of rural life and manifests her interest in nature, sustainability and traditional rural industries. For the past twenty years Elizabeth-Jane has been walking the Cornish Coast Path, collecting images and ideas for an ongoing body of work.  Four of these are in the Gallery.

Elizabeth Jane with her sheep

Over this time, she has also developed a small flock of native and rare breed sheep, kept on the six acres where she works.  There she also grows plants such as willow, ash, woad, nettles and apple to dye the wool from the sheep.  From these home-grown materials she creates fabulous artworks.

For the Flamm Festival Elizabeth -Jane is creating a large scale installation that will be sited in the Soldiers' or St Maurice's (patron saint of soldiers) Chapel in St Petrocs Church. The installation will embody the experience and emotions of [Dis]Location, the theme of the Flamm Festival, using stories of people who experienced war. The installation will convey the feeling of a narrative curtailed, an absence present.

She will use craft-based techniques and materials - wool, felting, spinning and natural plant dyes – to create visually and emotionally evocative images from stuff of the lower ranks of the art world, challenging notions of a visual hierarchy.

The installation will have two elements. The first is two large-scale landscapes (c 100 x 150 cm), representing the birth and death place of a Bodmin soldier, floating above a white clouded floor. The landscapes will be created from materials grown and foraged in Cornwall. They will evoke those places as they are today. The landscapes will flow out of their frames into white clouds spilling around the altar and floor.

The process

The intial felting process

The needle felting adds the detail

It is then covered in plastic and the wool is rubbed gently in a circualr motion, adding hot water and coating the hands with olive oil soap. Once this felting process is well underway the plastic is removed and it is rubbed vigourously. The image is then turned over and the felting process is repeated to the reverse side. The image is then rolled within a bamboo mat for 100 times in each direction, washed and dried and the needle felting is then done to add all of the detail. It is then ready to be framed.

The French lanscape piece that represents where John Osborn and so many others lost their lives

 The second element is red banners embroidered with phrases taken from writings by those who were sent to fight and those left behind, words which illustrate how the dislocation of war felt to men and women of the rank and file. The banners will be of the same material, and use the same dye plant (madder), as the original Duke of Cornwall Light Infantry (DCLI) uniforms. Their dimensions will approximate those of the current regimental colours (114 x 91 cm). The words and phrases chosen will be taken from material in the archives of Bodmin Keep.

The inspiration

John Osborn

For the purposes of this work, Elizabeth-Jane identified one such soldier, Bandsman Lance Corporal John Osborn, born in Bodmin and killed in action at Armentieres in 1915. John represents all lives lost in the tragedy of war. We tried to reach out to see if any of John's relatives are still in Bodmin but had no response so hope any that see this will be proud.

For both those sent away to fight and those left behind, essential pieces of life’s jigsaw are lost. Those who go experience ‘dislocation’ from home, community and their familiar landscape. People left behind have a hole torn in their social fabric, face the impossibility of understanding their loved ones’ experiences, and can find their own social, economic and physical environments ruptured or destroyed.

War literature often alludes to a landscape left behind, an idyll, the place one was fighting for. This contrasts with the alien landscape, the foreign field. Land, soil and earth have been much fought over. The land itself can be wounded. War creates a gulf. The people who come back from war come back to an altered place. Some people, of course, do not come back at all, permanently, physically and literally [Dis]Located.

Elizabeth- Jane's thoughts

Elizabeth-Jane is heavily invested in the artwork and the inspiration for it. She said

"I am fascinated, researching this project, by the stories of soldiers and those they left behind. These are stories relatable on both a personal and societal level. I hope my project will resonate with visitor’s memories from family histories as well as facilitate wider conversations about what that dislocation meant to Bodmin’s past and current identity. The subject matter is relevant to Bodmin communities, as evidenced by the importance of Armistice Day in the town’s calendar.

I intend to make work which is beautiful, created from locally grown materials through processes I have developed in my practice, aiming to engage people on an aesthetic level. There is potential through filming to make the work more widely accessible online. 

Video

2nd year degree (BA hons Digital Media) students from Cornwall Education Learning Trust (CELT) Higher Education, Bodmin College are creating a film about the process of creating this work for Flamm, and the history that informs the project. The students' work will be overseen and facilitated by Mark Talbot, Course Leader and Jon Drever, visiting lecturer.

More information

You can see video of the filming of the process on her Facebook page - Elizabeth-Jane Grose- which will give you a great idea of the work that is going into this project. We will be following up on this project to show the Flamm installation in the Church and the video.

You can see more about Elizabeth-Jane's living landscapes and other work on her website https://www.elizabethjanegrose.com

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