DESIGNER, artist and rug-maker Jane Exley is holding an exhibition and residency at the last working place of one of the 20th century’s most influential artists.

She is camped out at Cylinders Estate, Langdale, where German-born Kurt Schwitters, one of the founders of the modern art movement, spent his final couple of years building what he called a Merz Barn, before he died in a pauper’s hospital in Kendal.

The estate is now owned by charity Littoral Arts, who invited Jane to mount the exhibition and be artist in residence until September 4.

Jane said: “My association with Cylinders goes back many years.” She has already made rugs based on the sketches Schwitters made of how the Merz Barn would have looked if he had finished it.

“I’m inspired by the ever-changing colours and immutable forms of the Lakeland landscape where I live. But wherever I venture I have an inner passion to translate the landscape I see or be strongly influenced by the particular line work which may appear in an exhibition painting.

“And I’ll respond by creating sketches and finally a bespoke art rug which I will exhibit and sell from my workshop.”

In this exhibition she is displaying her rugs, made from Herdwick wool, as tapestries in the Shippon Gallery at Cylinders.

She is also producing paintings influenced by Schwitters’s designs, collages and compositional artworks to be used later in the design of limited edition Merz rugs.

And she is creating wool installations in the woods in Cylinders.

After the exhibition some of the work will be displayed in the home of Jane’s collaborator Martin Bagness, who lives in Schwitters’s first Ambleside home in Gale Crescent, as part of an Ambleside Kurt Schwitters trail.

Trained designer and artist Jane set up her business The Woolly Rug Company in Elterwater, in 1999 before moving to Rothay Bridge Boathouse, in Ambleside, two years ago.

She is a passionate supporter of Herdwick wool. She said: “Herdwicks provide naturally grey wool with a variety of fibres. This irregularity of tone gives it character and a compatibility with a range of natural organic flooring, whether wood or slate.

“The wool dyes well. Despite some people thinking that the irregular tone is out of fashion, I was determined to show how beautiful the tonal structure of Herdwick wool is and how well it looks dyed.

“It is also hard wearing, so when you buy a Herdwick rug you buy a product for life, not a part-time commodity,” said Jane.

“Using the fleeces makes the link between the sheep and the environment they come from and help The Lakes sustain their natural beauty.”

She makes bespoke rugs after interviewing customers and seeing where they want it to sit.

She then creates a design which is put on a stretched canvas before firing plain and dyed yarns out of a hand-tufting gun driven by compressed air. The result is a bespoke rug uniquely designed after responding to the customer’s individual requirements.