hazel berriman
Arts, Design, Education and Learning
1944 – 1997
Suggested by Di Downs and Janet Axten together
Di and Janet write,
“Hazel Berriman was a scholar, academic and museum professional active in Cornwall in the 1980s and 1990s and is to thank for promoting the creative and cultural history of West Cornwall.
In 1986 Newlyn Art gallery published her slim but thoroughly researched and informative book Arts and Crafts in Newlyn 1890 - 1930, and in 1993 Royal Cornwall Museum published her now much sought after book Cryséde: The unique textile designs of Alec Walker, the definitive book on the artist and the company.
These two publications acknowledged and celebrated designers and craftspeople who were active in Newlyn in the late 19th and early 20th centuries alongside more well known painters of the Newlyn School.
It was during her term as Assistant Curator at the Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro that Hazel curated the only major exhibition of Cryséde textile designs to date. Hazel’s exhibition brought to public awareness not only of the colourful and arresting print designs of Alec Walker but the fashion skills of his artist wife Kay and the dressmaking, printing and manufacturing skills of many unnamed local people, (re)kindling a sense of local textile heritage.
In 1996 Hazel was appointed as Director of Penlee House Gallery in Penzance where her role was to expand and modernise the building, a major undertaking.
I first met Hazel in the early 1990s when she was a lecturer at what was then Falmouth School of Art & Design, and it’s hard to believe that it was only in 1997 with the modernisation of Penlee House barely completed that she tragically died, a devastating loss to everyone whose consciousness she had touched.”