AMANDA Lebus has had a great year. An artist and storyteller, her creative home for the past 12 months has been within the imaginative walls of Welfare State International, as its artist-in-residence.

She reckons Ulverston’s WSI has a revolutionary tenderness that can have a transforming effect.

And Amanda herself has made her own mark, as WSI artistic director John Fox tells me through her passionate approach to art, she has inspired many local people to draw on their own imaginations.

A lot of Amanda’s work has been collaborative – with teams of artists, including In a Tea Cup with Hannah Fox and Sue Gill, using puppetry, storytelling and music as a response to people’s stories about the night they were born, their siblings or their children, from the very elderly to the young.

Pam Sandiford penned the words and the trio staged various performances with a portable storytelling space created by Duncan Copley: “It was very moving, very diverse and very exciting.” Her South Lakeland stint, through the Northern Arts Encore scheme, started with 100 brightly coloured boats on a river of salt and sand in Sense of Occasion: “Everything I’ve done has been exciting,” she said.

“I depart with more of an understanding of who I am.

“I’m sad to be leaving. It’s been an intense and powerful year and I’m grateful to WSI and the people of Ulverston.” Drawing Breath is her parting gesture and is running at Lanternhouse, The Ellers, until November 1.

The exhibition is the culmination of her research into birth rites: the perceptions and creative responses of people of all ages in relation to birth and childhood, and adventures in seeing the world from a child’s perspective.

Each month between February and June, Amanda displayed a snapshot of her work. This series of ‘disclosures’ offered a special opportunity to keep abreast of her ongoing research, a diary of visual sketches and experimentation, as she built a body of work towards her final show.

It highlights perfectly Amanda’s fantastic figurative skills blessed with a poetic line.

“When I start to draw, I know the scale at which I shall work, but not much else. I sit before the paper, staring, until I can see a shape in my head.

“It won’t be a version of the image I want to create. It’s more a premonition of the important forms I want to communicate.

“When I started Sounding the Bridge, which shows the judge in his robes, the shape in my head was of interlocking arches, moving forward and back at a diagonal to the page.

“Planning doesn’t work for me. Sketching is like learning a language. If you look at a chin that is a particular shape, you add that to your repertoire of what chins can be.

“Sketching isn’t drawing. Sketching is a process of coming to understand the object to be drawn. Drawing is creating an image that has meaning. I sketch from life and draw from memory.” Lanternhouse is open Monday-Saturday, 11am-4pm. Admission is free For further details, contact 01229-581127.