Biography
Susan Bosence (neé Payne; b. Luton, Bedfordshire, UK 1913 - d. 2011) started her working life at the New Education Fellowship in London, moving in 1939 to the post of secretary to W.B. Curry, the headmaster at Dartington Hall School, part of the estate in Devon owned by the enlightened Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst.
In 1942 she married Wilfred 'Bo' Bosence, a teacher in the junior school at Dartington. She had begun to experiment with textiles, conscious of Dartington friends in the crafts like the potters Marianne de Trey and Bernard Forrester, and encouraged by Bernard Leach, and Muriel Rose, of the British Council. Her introduction to blockprinted textiles came through examples by Barron and Larcher that she saw in the Elmhirsts' home. She produced printed patterns made with lino-blocks, often using two simple but opposed geometric motifs. Bosence's first exhibition was in 1961, at the Ceylon Tea Centre in London where her interest in ethnic textile techniques demonstated she was several decades ahead of fashion, after which she opened a dyehouse and printing classroom for the new Adult Education Centre at Dartington. She moved to Sigford, Dartmoor in 1966 and taught at Camberwell School of Art and Farnham Art School for over 20 years (her archive is kept at the Crafts Study Centre, Farnham). She wrote Handblock Printing and Resist-dyeing in 1985. During the 1990s she exhibited frequently in Bristol, Dartington, London, Plymouth and Bath, including the group show Colour into Cloth at the Crafts Council in London in 1994.
