Seashells and Lavender

Reportage 13595402 | © living4media / Narratives / Holly Jolliffe, | 60 images

It’s another sunny morning and Jo, a painter and textile artist, is setting off on foot to explore the surrounding coastline, camera in hand, down the windy paths through the oak woods to the open expanse of St Helens Duver, a grassy hinterland between the shining sea and the trees that is haunted by beauty and rare wildlife. This daily journey through the landscape provides the starting point for her work, as the images Jo captures with her camera will become drawings, then linocuts, before eventually being printed onto textiles to be sold through her business, Seashells and Lavender. Jo and her husband Ian moved to the picturesque village of St Helens on the Isle of Wight in August 2014 from the New Forest where they had lived for 8 years, their only regret is that they didn’t do it sooner. Ian now enjoys his daily commute having swapped his car and an arduous stretch on the motorway for a bicycle ride and then a journey by boat across to Portsmouth, where he is a design and production manager for Brittany Ferries. On the day when I visit these ‘overners’, the term given by locals to people from the mainland who make the island their base, Ian and Jo wax poetical about their new life. It is almost as if they can’t believe their luck that this is now their home and need to keep pinching themselves to remind each other that it is real.