Belinda Budge walks the same paths through the north Dorset countryside each day, collecting fir cones, thistles and twigs along the way. It’s a very different life from her years as a trailblazer in the publishing world. These days she works as an artist and textile maker in a peaceful valley near the village of Bryanston, drawing inspiration from the rural landscape around her, endlessly fascinated by the changing seasons, the chalk paths, the walnut trees and the farmers’ ploughing patterns.
Back at home in her studio, she dips the materials she’s gathered in walnut ink to make marks on linen or delicate gampi paper, repeating the patterns over and over again to produce stunning works of art. The shapes she creates are inspired by the land and the sea – indents left by a tractor, marks in the grass, observations along the coastline or simply the pattern of her walks. She records every walk in her sketchbook and the patterns are always different.
‘The drawings reflect the ever-changing sowing patterns of the Dorset fields – quiet rhythms shaped by season, weather and the movement of the land,’ she says. ‘Each piece of work begins with something found – a mark, a piece of bark, a trace in the soil. Those small moments become patterns that are layered, stitched, printed and sometimes woven into a range of surfaces.’
Belinda came up with the idea of making her own walnut ink on a walk along nearby Walnut Avenue, a lane of walnut trees planted in the 1700s. Each autumn she collects the husks of the walnuts to make her ink, then leaves them in her garden for up to two months until they start to turn black. She boils up the husks, sieves them through a cloth and pours the ink into small pots, adding a clove so the liquid doesn’t turn mouldy.
‘I’ve got quite a store of different inks in my studio, dating back over the last five years,’ she says. ‘I mark every one of them so I know which year they were made. They vary a lot so if I want a paler colour I know that 2022 wasn’t quite so strong. The cloves give a wonderful smell when I open a new pot of ink.’
Belinda and her graphic designer brother Patrick run their own textile and design partnership called Studio BudgeBudge, partnering on everything from textiles and fashion to film making and typography. Together, working with the marks from Belinda’s work, they digitally transform them into patterns and designs across a range of surfaces. Everything they make is something they would want to live with themselves – to wear, to hold, to display and to treasure.
Keen to see what her designs looked like when they were woven and scaled up, Belinda bought some Dorset Down organic wool from Ellen Simms at Tamarisk Farm in West Bexington with the intention of making Jacquard weave samples. The provenance of the materials, the focus on the layers of the landscape and working with both sides of the material are all central to her work. She commissioned Hastings textile designer Kirsty McDougall to make a set of sample designs and was so excited by the result that she collaborated with Alex Begg, a luxury textile manufacturer on the west coast of Scotland, to produce a limited run of exquisite cashmere and wool blankets.
The blankets were woven using three designs from Belinda’s textile collections. One side of each blanket has deep walnut tones, the other the chalk of the landscape. Each is individually numbered and they are available to buy on her website. Customers adore them so much that several have told her they want to be buried in theirs.
Belinda has also collaborated with Piero D’Angelo, an award-winning fashion designer who uses natural materials to create sustainable fashion. The pair knew each other from their time at the Royal College of Art. ‘Piero and I were speaking to each other one day and he saw one of my designs on the wall in the background,’ says Belinda. ‘He said it would make an incredible suit, so we started working together. He used my fabrics for his ready-to-wear collection and it was amazing to see my designs on the body.’
Much to her delight Piero used one of her leaf designs to make her a pair of stunning satin trousers. ‘They’re quite cool – and yes, I do wear them,’ she smiles.
Belinda’s creative success is all the more impressive because she has already had stellar careers in academia and publishing. As a child she sat and painted all day and thought she’d be an artist when she grew up. She studied art and design in a social context, ‘quite a radical course in those days’, at Dartington College of Arts and later did a degree in cultural theory at Middlesex University and a master’s in women’s studies at the University of Kent.
At that point she moved into publishing, working for The Women’s Press and Virago in the 1980s and co-founding Scarlet Press, a start-up feminist publishing company. She then joined HarperCollins, one of the world’s largest and most influential publishers, progressing through the ranks to become group publisher and main board director. ‘I said “I’ll come for a year” and I ended up staying 22 years. It was a huge job and I loved it.’
Much as she enjoyed her role at HarperCollins, at the age of 57 she made the tough decision to resign and do something completely different.
She says: ‘Publishing is a wonderful creative industry. You’re reading stories, understanding the Zeitgeist, building lists and growing talent. But it’s about enabling other people’s creativity and putting their creativity out into the world. It was really exciting, and I loved it, but I always knew that at some point I would need to return to my own creative work.
‘It was a heart decision, not a head decision, to leave, and I kind of jumped into the blue. I had to be quite courageous and bold because they really wanted me to stay.’
Belinda started her new life by enrolling on a portfolio course at Central Saint Martins, joining 15 other students who were building their portfolios in textiles, weaving and fashion. After ‘a brilliant year’ at Central Saint Martins her tutors suggested she should apply to the Royal College of Art to do a master’s in mixed media textiles. The course is highly competitive but she was immediately offered a place.
‘Just being there was an extraordinary privilege,’ she says. ‘I was the oldest but everyone embraced me and I didn’t feel any different. I’d come from being at the centre of a huge multinational corporation and running everything and now I was in a group with four other students with people asking “What sort of artist do you want to be?” I had no idea really. I just wanted to try everything – screen printing, weaving, woodworking, anything I could get my hands on.’
By the second year she began to focus on mark making and using her own natural walnut ink in her work.
‘In some ways my practice hasn’t really changed much since then,’ she says. ‘I work with very limited materials, using the same papers and the same process that I started at the RCA. But my work has of course evolved. Every piece belongs to the next. That’s my process and my inspiration.’
The Dorset coastline influences Belinda’s work almost as much as the landscape. She and her partner George are keen sailors – they keep their 40ft Swan yacht in Poole Harbour – and she once used remnants of her fabric samples to make a vast sail for it. One of her much repeated patterns is called Sail Stitch, inspired by the repeating V-shaped marks left by a tractor in the fields and the traditional stitching found on a canvas sail. Dorset’s iconic Dancing Ledge provides the inspiration for one of her blanket designs.
A passionate champion of creativity, Belinda recently stepped down from a long tenure as chair of Creative UK, the independent network for the UK’s creative industries, to focus on her own creative work.
But despite her passion for making, she’s still a publisher. Along with two friends, Vicky Wilson and The Times journalist Ann Treneman, she launched The Ida Project, a network that brings together women over the age of 60 to make connections and share stories of their lives.
‘I feel that now it’s my moment to give time to my work,’ says Belinda. ‘It’s a very restorative and meditative practice. Just being in my studio, being really stuck into something, is the thing that brings me joy.’
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