ONE of the great strengths of the Green Door artist collective is its diverse, ever widening spectrum of styles and techniques.

Quality is certainly synonymous where the name Green Door is concerned, across all contemporary art forms.

Painting a fresh picture, Fusion is GD's latest exhibition which sees the self-managed, not-for-profit artists' co-operative return to one of its spiritual homes, Kendal's Brewery Arts Centre, a long association that harks back to the mid 1990s and the halcyon days of the then Brewery's visual arts officer Lene Bragger and GD's formative years.

Running until July 21, Fusion brims with exciting and eclectic art: ceramics, glass, mixed media, painting, photography, printmaking and textiles.

Jill Pemberton’s painting Diaspora is inspired by the desperation of losing home, family and a sense of one’s place. Clinging on to a familiar historically charged object like a prayer mat, rolled under the arm with the threads dangling off the edges like the fine root tentacles anchoring to the past.

"It's a powerful image," explained Jill. "I am constructing my painting like a carpet; lines and marks woven over and through warp and weft. The bright colours ordered; shapes defined, meaning displayed. Then unravelled, tangled - the pathways confused, edges frayed. The process begins with order; coloured inks pulled through silk and laid flat. Then the blurring begins. The chaos dominates. It's all there. But rearranged into a new order"

Marie Wright’s Winter Tapestry series, melds together the field boundaries of Cumbria and a tapestry of colour and pattern influenced by the richness of an oriental carpet to create a texture that hints at the layers of change within the landscape. She uses a variety of printmaking techniques to create individual pieces embedded in her surroundings near Morecambe Bay.

Also exhibiting in Fusion is Ann Marie Foster, who uses techniques that combine mixed media and innovative printmaking.

She said that her compositions are anchored in exploration of the organic features found in nature such as plant structures, texture and surface markings.

"My focus shifts between the microscopic, such as the fragile architecture of a decaying leaf, to the expansive markings of landscape as in the scarred furrows exposed by estuary tides. My impressions are translated on to the paper’s surface through a combination of painterly printmaking processes: monotype, monoprint, collagraph and drypoint. I invite the viewer to investigate the fusion of colour, imagery and texture and discover a personal connection that resonates with their own thoughts and emotions."

The Brewery show is one of Green Door's biggest showcases of work for many years with 30 artists in the frame.

GD administrator, Janice Benson said they were delighted to be back at the Kendal arts centre.

"Green Door artists have enjoyed the challenge of creating new work for this exhibition and the Sugar Store Gallery is a fantastic space to show their work at its best."