A private function

Fiona Russell meets Michele Howarth Rashman, an artist who likes to work with a material she can afford.

High above St George’s Square in Hebden Bridge, at the top of a rickety wooden staircase, is the attic studio of Michele Howarth Rashman.

The publicity for her latest shows describes her as “reclusive”, and two doors which you encounter here and a series of intimidating signs (“Private”, “No Access”, “Unattended Children Will Be Sold to the Circus”) only reinforce that impression.

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But in person she is small, black-clad, friendly, not a little witchy, and very funny.

“They’re really to keep my friends out,” she confides when I ask about the notices. “They come for a cup of tea and I can’t get rid of them.” It’s easy to see why.

On a clear but chilly morning the studio is filled with colour and light. The heater is on and the view from the window is endlessly fascinating. Michele seats herself in what is clearly her favourite spot watching the square below. “You know, nobody ever looks up,” she says and grins: “Nobody knows I’m here.”

Michele watches and a listens. The title of her latest exhibition which ran in London to the end of last month and is now about to open at the Artsmill in Hebden Bridge is taken from a conversation overheard in the post office.

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“One old woman was saying to another: ‘There’s one in the village, he calls himself Margaret’.” And it set me thinking, about the huge difference between how we want to be seen and how others see us. There was this person choosing to call himself Margaret. It seemed such an old-fashioned, commonplace name. There was something poignant about his modest aspiration. If he’d chosen something exotic it wouldn’t have been nearly so moving.’

“Margaret”, as imagined by Michele, is now one of a series of larger than life-size figures which each began as a small pad of kapok encased in a piece of nylon stocking.

Michele gradually builds-up the pad, stitching layer upon layer, tight upon tight, using tiny micro-stitches which are so small she has to use magnifying glasses. The final effect is something between patchwork and cellulite, pale, grotesque, but peculiarly life-like.

“Sometimes I think: ‘I’ve gone too far’. And then I look out of the window and see somebody walking by (particularly in the summer) and think: ‘I’ve not gone far enough’.”

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The figures are comical and sad, saggy and bleary-eyed, but Michele insists they are also noble: “They’re making an effort. And those people are always so much more interesting than those who, whether through beauty or privilege, don’t have to try.”

Much of the effect depends upon the materials she is working with. So how did she end up working in tights, so to speak?

“Both my Mum and my grandmother knitted and sewed – Nan had a sewing machine next to her bed. In those days, all your clothes were made at home, from school uniforms to bridesmaid dresses. You only went to a shop as a very special treat.”

It seemed natural therefore to use stitching in her work. “A metal or woodwork-shop would have been completely alien to me. I could have used more traditional techniques in my sculpture to show I was as good as the lads. But I’ve never felt I had anything to prove.”

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Michele went to Leeds Polytechnic to study Fine Art in a notoriously turbulent but also hugely creative department. “It was very diverse, but also very macho. They gave you a studio space, told you to get on with it, and said: ‘We’ll be in the pub, if you want us’. I’ve never been afraid of a big boisterous bloke since.”

Students either sank or swam. Michele thrived: “You could do anything. It didn’t matter if you were working in tights and kapok. You were making art regardless, and the only real criterion was whether it was any good or not.”

Working in tights also came in handy because there was no money, a situation the canny Michele had worked out was unlikely to change once she had graduated. “I was very practical when I was a student. It seemed pointless to do bronze casting because I wasn’t going to be able to carry on working in bronze once I’d left.”

Tights on the other hand were cheap, and for years she had a free supply. “My Mum used to send me her old ones.” But now she buys them herself. Happily, expensive tights are no use: “They’re too fine. I need ones that won’t ladder, support stockings really.”

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Leeds left her “fearless, independent, resourceful and unemployable”, but she had good luck. Her work was exhibited for the first time in London alongside the celebrity Turner-prize winning artist Grayson Perry and attracted the attention of one-time Bradford-based gallerist Nicholas Treadwell who championed her for a number of years. She had a brief fling with film making and script-writing in the 1990s (Oh Julie, an animated short film shared joint first prize at the World Animation Festival with Wallace and Gromit). But she continued to make art.

She exhibits rarely (only once in the 90s), but despite this her work has always sold. “I don’t have any of my old work,” she says with a mixture of satisfaction and regret. The Who’s’ John Entwistle, was an important patron for many years and the guitarist from Police, Andy Summers, amongst others, has work in his collection.

In the mid-90s she moved back up north, to Hebden Bridge, and, for a number of years, lived high on the moors above Cragg Vale. “It was magnificent and terrible. The weather was ferocious. I remember watching my cat being blown off a mole hill – it was having a wee.” She now lives half way down a hill, and though it’s still “pretty wild”, it feels “a bit sissy living below the tree line”. She’ll probably move back up to the tops one day: “I like it bleak”.

In fact, she’s beginning to acquire the image of a wild woman of the moors. She was recently described as “a charmingly rustic antidote” to the contemporary London art scene (which begs the question what on earth London art critics think goes on in West Yorkshire). But she is enjoying the fun, not least by insisting on drawing parallels between herself and West Yorkshire’s own weird sisters, the Brontës.

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There are parallels. Like the talented girls from Haworth Parsonage, Michelle spends her days engaged in meticulous, minute work (“developing long-sight and a dowager’s hump”) and she has a keen eye, which can get her into trouble (“I do use people I know and it can get a bit tricky”). And while she chooses to base herself in Yorkshire, she exhibits with the best of her London contemporaries. In her case Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin rather than William Makepeace Thackeray. And then there is the family connection. On her father’s side she is a Howarth, but on her mother’s side there are Haworths too.

Parish records show her great-great grandmother was christened by none other than Patrick Brontë and her great-great-great-grandmother is buried in the parsonage graveyard. “I’m virtually a tourist attraction,” she insists happily.

But now it’s time to shut the studio door and get back to work. “I have to be anti-social. The work takes so long that I need to be really mean with my time.” This exhibition was two years in the making. When will the next one happen?

I consult “Other Stuff” on her website hoping for a preview. “Coming soonish” is all it says.

Michele Howarth Rashman’s exhibition He Calls Himself Margaret opens at Artsmill at Linden Mill, Linden Road, Hebden Bridge on February 1. 01422 843413, www.artsmill.org.