Sheffield artist Kate Jacob on dementia, loss and her exhibition How To Knit A Nebula at Mura Ma gallery

“Because they are really intimate pieces,” she says. “It's a strange thing, but I think some of the process of making the work is a bit like falling in love.”

That sounds like it could drag up some pretty intense emotions for an artist who typically has around 40 canvases on the go at one time.

A passion for the project right in front of her is understandable, though, given her life’s work has been one punctuated by long pauses, affected by the loss of loved ones - her late husband and, more recently, her mother.

That perseverance only makes her first solo exhibition in 20 years all the more special.

How To Knit A Nebula is on now at the Mura Ma independent gallery, which celebrates rising artists with interesting stories, in the Marple area of Stockport. Jacob’s latest body of abstract works explore grief, loss and memory, and are displayed after a time in which she supported her mother, Emily, through dementia.

Ahead of the exhibition, she was excited but daunted. “What you do is so personal, it's quite easy to hide in a group exhibition. And then obviously, in a solo show, there's no hiding,” says Jacob, 57, of Nether Edge.

However, she does not lack for experience. Jacob was brought up in London but attracted to “this mythical north,” she says, and after studying textiles at Manchester Metropolitan University, relocated to Sheffield. It was where she met her husband, Dave, and where she has stayed for 27 years.

The Sheffield art scene back then was “very quiet,” she adds, but “if the opportunity is not there, then you make it, and I think artists are really good at doing that and they're very entrepreneurial and it's not something people really think of, often, with artists, but I think they do it all the time.”

One example is Jacob’s co-founding of Open Up Sheffield more than two decades ago. The annual event allows people to visit working South Yorkshire studios, talk to the artists and makers and have the chance to buy original pieces of work. Painters, ceramicists, printmakers, embroiderers, sculptors, jewellers and creatives from other disciplines have taken part over the years.

The idea came around the turn of the millennium when, says Jacob, there were more grants available. And it still works, she thinks, because people believe there is a “mystery around arts and artists” who seem to exist in their own “little turrets”. But in reality “a lot of artists really like to talk about their work and really like people to look at their work,” she says, because it brings a different perspective to it.

Jacob’s own exhibiting work was gathering momentum in the early noughties, but halted when Dave received a diagnosis of bowel cancer. He died in 2007, aged 50.

She says: “I’d had a show at the Graves in Sheffield, and was starting to kind of be able to make in-roads into London and it just stopped - went bang. And it was the day he was diagnosed - bang, that's it, stopped. And I worked because I needed to be busy. But I was at that point doing project management and business management for other companies, because I needed something that wasn't arts based, I needed to not think about it, I needed to go to work, do my job, come home.”

Having become a solo parent to then 16-month-old daughter, Sophie, and mourning the loss of her partner, she stopped painting for a long time.

“I had a studio space and I never went in it for seven years,” says Jacob, now laughing at the memory.

She adds: “I think the theme of loss (in my art) probably started when my husband died but it was very much a period where I couldn't work because going into the studio was almost too silent. So now, where I really appreciate the silence when I go in, then, it was just like, ‘I can't stay in this silence’. It was too overwhelming.”

When she did eventually return to painting, how did it feel?

“Glorious.”

She says: "I walked into this space where I had set everything up and it just felt like a part of me had come back. It was like there had been a part of me missing.”

It was not until the coronavirus pandemic happened that she started painting full-time again.

The long process has taught her that “as a career, art is not linear. There's not a line that you follow. It weaves all over the place.”

In the intervening period she had worked for a company which toured comedians and speakers but after she returned to art fully, she continued to develop her credentials by completing fine art courses at Turps Art School and Morley College London.

Exhibitions she has featured in over recent years include Gesture and Geometry at Bloc Projects, Sheffield, and Material Presence at the Fitzrovia Gallery, London.

During her time in Yorkshire, she also developed and managed many projects including Print and Drawing Summer Schools at what was the Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield, working with artists Claude Heath and Steve Carley, and has delivered seminars for creatives.

Her mother died last year and in How To Knit A Nebula, the artist, promotional material explains, “attempts to trace the voids, space, and places of loss and memory”.

A nebular, a giant cloud of cosmic dust and gas, is the former site of a star, but also its birthplace, which is described as “a fitting description of the metaphysical time and space Jacob is reaching for in her painting”.

She works with water-based paints, predominantly acrylics mixed in with ink and watercolour.

“It's a very intuitive process,” she says. “I never know quite what image I'm going to end up with when I start, and I start with quite a loose process. And from that, the story starts to evolve.”

She will get a layer of paint down, a particular colour or shape might take her fancy and she builds from there. “So I can be doing two or three tiny little adjustments to a painting a day and then I come back, and I do the same thing the next day, and then the next day.”

While the latest paintings explore “themes that we find difficult and we perceive as being dark,” she says, “actually a lot of the colours in this work are really bright and celebratory,” and serve as a memorial to her mother’s “refusal, almost, to give in to dementia”.

Jacob says: “Over the last year and a half my mum was getting progressively more and more frail. I mean she was 91, but in that last year in particular, we'd all started to notice some beginnings of memory loss.

"But I was really taken by watching her trying to find her memories. Like they were kind of things that she was trying to grab hold of outside of herself, almost. She'd look around trying to find it. There was something really beautiful about watching her determination to find that memory.”

How To Knit A Nebula is on until February 10, and Kate Jacob will deliver an artist talk at the Mura Ma gallery on Friday, February 9, 7pm-8.30pm.