Jennifer Hex: 1938-2016 – an appreciation
JENNIFER EDA HEX was born on June 6, 1938, in London, but shortly afterwards moved to Kilbirnie, Ayrshire, her mother’s home town.
She studied printmaking at Glasgow School of Art from 1956 to 1960, and subsequently taught art in Beith High School and then, in the 1970s, at Campbeltown Grammar School.
Not having the facilities to do printmaking in Campbeltown, she turned to making textiles, manipulating, stitching and embroidering cloth in a variety of techniques of her own invention.
Varied
These works varied in scale from large textured wall-hangings to small framed embroidered panels, mostly in a restricted range of colour: whites, greys, blues.
In 1980 she retired from teaching and moved to other places in the Highlands: Isle of Colonsay, Tomintoul, and in 1986 to Culloden Moor, near Inverness.
In the winter of 1989/90 she was art- ist-in-residence at four island schools in Argyll, and the four textile panels she produced there – three embroideries and a patchwork – are now in the Argyll and Bute Art Collection. She regularly exhibited her work with New Scottish Embroidery Group, based in Edinburgh.
While at Culloden she had joined the long-established Inverness Botany Group, who arranged indoor talks in winter and field-trips in summer, covering a wide area of the Northern Highlands, and on moving back to Kintyre in 2002 she joined local botanists to start a similar group here, al- beit on a smaller, more informal scale. She had a particular and infectious enthusiasm for sedges.
Jennifer had her own particular vision. She saw things that other people tended to overlook or take for granted or pass by; but they were not in any way strange or exceptional things.
Clearer vision
They were things which we might all see, every day, if we simply possessed a clearer vision of the sort that she had. She saw elemental things: water, air, fire, earth; that’s to say, the sea, rivers, waterfalls – even the very small ones in a burn interested her – the sky, clouds, the moon and stars, grasses and sedges … natural things in movement or in flux.
Her embroideries and patchworks, her sewings, as she called them, manipulated cloth in many ingenious ways; they suggested rock faces or geological formations, starry night skies or the moon coming out of clouds, raindrops or snowflakes moving down a window-pane, the flow and eddies of the River Ness in spate, a big wave breaking over the rocks on Islay.
Her earlier print-making activities, her always tentative pencil drawings and her more recent photographs, all showed the same clear vision. This was her way of understanding the world. It helps us to see, and adds to our understanding. This is what a real artist does.
This appreciation first appeared in issue 80 of The Kintyre Magazine, the publication of the Kintyre Antiquarian and Natural History Society. Its editor, Angus Martin, said: ‘Jennifer Hex, who died and is buried in Southend, was responsible for the cover illustrations of the first six issues of magazine, beginning in spring 1977.’