Kate Lynch talks to John Hudson about sheep – and lambing, shearing, knitting, weaving, carpet making, slaughtering, butchering...

K ate Lynch is not the kind of artist you will find at the top of an ivory tower. As qualified in teaching as in painting, she has a long history of leading schools and community art projects in Somerset, and from that has stemmed an even more grassroots approach to her latest work.

For most of this century Kate, a professional painter for 25 years, has been devoting herself to long-term projects in which she's thrown herself headlong into the working life of the rural people of the Somerset Levels and their surroundings.

First, it was the willow growing and weaving community. And now it's everything to do with sheep – "from lamb to loom", as she puts it – a three-year exploration that has resulted in a memorable set of oil paintings and charcoal drawings, a book, and a touring exhibition that can currently be enjoyed in Cirencester.

"I've been lambing in spring and shearing in summer," she says. "I've been to market in autumn and milking the ewes in the parlour." But that's not the half of it. She's also painted and chronicled the work of cheese makers, knitters, weavers, workers in felt and tanning, the carpet loom minders of Axminster, slaughtermen and butchers.

She discovered that in some cases, the trades or crafts had been in the same family for generations – and she met men and women who, while embracing 21st-century technology in their day-to-day working lives, make a point of keeping traditional skills alive.

Take Andy Wear, who with his wife Jen runs a flock of Shetland sheep on the Mendips near Compton Martin. From a sheep farming family, he's sheared on vast factory farms in Australia and runs machine shearing courses for British Wool Marketing.

But he's equally adept with hand blades, loves the absence of noise and heat when he's using them, and has a hunch that the sheep enjoy them, too.

There's a stark and unsentimental air to most of Kate's images. For many people who work with sheep it's a tough, no-nonsense kind of life, and even the most joyful picture in the book, the bounding spring lamb seen here, is atmospheric rather than idyllic. It looks a chill and windswept kind of day, and you could believe the poor little thing is jumping up and down to keep warm, rather than to celebrate life.

Kate talks of the way in which both willow and wool make the journey from the marshy fields right up to Buckingham Palace: woven basketwork frames for the guardsmen's bearskins and plush Axminster carpets for the state rooms. Some visitors to the current exhibition in Gloucestershire might add Stroud scarlet for the guards' coats to that list.

It's not quite Buck House, but when the show was launched in up-market Cirencester Fiona Haser – the arts administrator who once had the centre of Bradford-on-Avon grassed over as a publicity stunt – arranged for a flock of Cotswold sheep to be driven through town for the first time in years.

Kate found it all very exciting.

"Those great, woolly Cotswolds were so different from the Exmoor horn sheep I'm used to seeing," she says.

"I'd never come across them before, and it was lovely to meet the breeders, Derek and Maggie Cross, and discover how passionate they are about the breed."

Kate, a member of the Royal West of England Academy, is originally from London, but has been in this part of the world for the past 30 years. She lived near Castle Cary with her husband James, another notable painter of landscapes and animals, before they moved westward to High Ham, near Langport.

"I like life on the local scale, finding out about our ancient landscape and the history and traditions of the area," she says. "Where we live now is a smaller-scale landscape from the one we were used to, and when we first arrived we were struck by what was still going on here, the cider orchards and the peat digging.

"Many of the people I met on both this project and when I was doing the willow paintings (the exhibition was in 2003) seem to me to be flying in the face of the way our culture is going, with its uniformity and globalisation.

"I find they give you a sense of optimism, and a feeling that there are still other values from the ones that prevail elsewhere in society."

It is hardly an in-your-face kind of optimist that you get from her paintings. You must look to the likes of Beryl Cook if that's what you're after.

But as a quiet, sympathetic and subtle account of the survival of long-cherished trad- itions, her paintings are warm and reassuring.

We can only hope that 50 years from now, committed people will look at them and be able to say: "Look, we still do that today."

■ The exhibition Sheep: From Lamb to Loom, with sound recordings by Alastair Goolden, was launched at the Brewhouse Gallery in Taunton in March and is now at New Brewery Arts in Cirencester, Gloucestershire, tel 01285 657181, until June 21.

On June 20 and 21 there will be a wool activities weekend including "Coat in a Day", in which three sheep will be sheared at sunrise and a complete garment ready to wear by evening.

The exhibition will then move to Settle in the Yorkshire Dales before visiting Black Swan Arts in Frome from August 22 to October 3 and the Guildhall Heritage and Arts Centre at Dulverton from October 5 to 17.

Kate Lynch's hardback book Sheep: From Lamb to Loom is published by Furlong Fields Publishing at £18.