ONE of Tynedale’s best-known and best-loved artists has a new exhibition in Hexham.

Fans of the Floss books about a border collie featuring wonderful illustrations of a Northumbrian working farm, will probably be familiar with the name Kim Lewis, but not necessarily with the fine artist’s wider work.

In her first solo exhibition, the Robinson-Gay gallery in Market Street is showing a new series of collages, drawings and prints inspired by favourite and found objects on Kim’s studio table.

According to gallery owner Sarah Robinson-Gay, the objects, transferred to the page express transition, place, memories, use, tenderness and change.

Kim herself says, “One day, in a period of inbetween-ness, I noticed the objects which had gathered and cluttered my studio and decided, for comfort, to draw them.

“The project became one of surprise juxtapositions, bringing together items from home and outside which seemed to match drifts of thinking at the time.

“Specimens of pilgrimage, holding and finding, scattered, precious items from past and present, rubbings, old printed papers and the ever-present tools and pottery offered a way to illustrate an echoing phrase in my mind from one of my favourite poems – Border Song by Linda France – ‘Don’t we know where inside and outside meet is what matters most?’”

Kim came to Tynedale via London and her birthplace, Montreal in Canada, having studied fine art at university followed by postgraduate printmaking at Hornsey College of Art.

She worked as an independent artist before becoming the author and illustrator of over 20 picture books for children.

In 2007, she returned to fine art, creating work for chosen poetry and literary texts for exhibition and publication. She works from home and her studio at The Hearth in Horsley.

l Lost and Found – New works by Kim Lewis runs until November 19.