Jerome Speekman

Immigrated to Australia in 1969 from Amsterdam and has been a resident of Bellingen since 1986, Jerome Speekman started to embroider at 30 years of age, a spur of the moment thing to try some stitching when he had the flu. “I got so many compliments on my first embroidery (a tail of a comet) that it encouraged me to do better.”
Retiring from his computer shop at 55 he became a house husband giving him time to pursue his art.
Jerome was at odds with the position that his craft was not fine art, believing that needlework had moved from “the antimacassar your great grandmother embroidered” (although exquisite), to an art form in its own right.

His recent works leave no doubt with the viewer that he has taken a major departure from traditional, functional embroidery. Bold and confronting, complex works and challenging images literally leap out at you and away from the traditional needle work.