For many centuries thrifty housewives have saved odd scraps of cloth and sewn them together to be re-used as patchwork. Their humble recycling ultimately produced the spectacular geometrically patterned quilts that now are valuable collectibles, and today many people around the world pursue patchwork as a serious art form. Japan is a particular center of the craft.

"Magdalen College Tower, Oxford," 97x78cm

Modern patchwork, though creative, has still tended to stick to abstract designs. One who chose a different path, preferring representation to mere geometry, was Edrica Huws (1907-1999), a retrospective of whose work will be at Osaka Matsuzakaya department store April 12-17. Huws' complex, layered works are mosaics of cloth. The original patterns of the individual pieces are lost, or rather subsumed, in the overall design: a landscape, still life, figure or portrait.

Born Edrica Tyrwhitt, the daughter of a prominent architect and a painter, she studied painting herself at the Chelsea Art School and the Royal College of Art. In the late 1920s her oils and lithographs were exhibited in London.

Then in 1931 she married Welsh artist Richard Huws, and, like many other women artists, put her own art aside for a couple of decades while she raised a family.

Yet the creative current still flowed. The bits of cloth she saved up over the years called her to use them, and in 1958 she began her first patchwork project.

Huws' legacy from oil painting, and particularly the Impressionists, is plain to see in her work. Outlines are imprecise; she assembled masses and matched tones until shapes and depths emerged. Up close, though, the painterliness disappears. The bits of cloth reveal themselves, and what seemed clear is suddenly ambiguous, questionable.

Huws exhibited her works in Japan a number of times, and has a devoted following here. She was still producing new works until shortly before her death at 92.