Mabel Pakenham-Walsh was a woodcarver and craftsperson based in Aberystwyth, west Wales. She was also a political campaigner and storyteller – and a pioneering woman at a time when it was hard for women to access training in the arts. Mabel had a reputation as an eccentric. A formidable character, she had huge determination and strong views which came out through her artwork, poetry and drawings.

I met Mabel while working at Ceredigion Museum – Mabel was a regular visitor. I got to know her through working on her retrospective in 2012, alongside a publication about her life and work and an interview filmed by Culture Colony. This interview took place at her home, in a room full of quirky objects and artworks, including a piece by the author and illustrator Marcus Sedgwick.

Mabel was a well-known figure in Aberystwyth – she was always out on the prom and would frequently visit us at the Museum. She would tell anecdotes about her life and would come to check on the works she had donated. I was fascinated by the stories she told, of her determination to become an artist at a time when it was not easy for disabled women, or for those with little financial resource.

When I met her, Mabel was a wheelchair user. She had been in a car accident in Lancaster when she was young, which fractured her skull and left her struggling to walk. She had to hide her impairment to get into art school in Wimbledon – she told me disabled students were excluded from art schools at this time, and had no support. 'In those days you weren't "ill" .. and after that, for the next thirty years, no one believed me because, I think, keeping my brain alive and keeping my hands busy kept me going.'

In 2011, I proposed the idea of a retrospective, and we were able to borrow a key piece, Gate, from the Crafts Council as a centrepiece to the show. Mabel wasn't well during the time we were working on the exhibition, and her memory was deteriorating. The exhibition gave us an opportunity to share and preserve some of her life story.

Mabel was born in Lancaster and grew up in a mental health hospital where her father was a doctor, which had a profound effect on her early life. As a girl, she loved to read, and her introduction to the work of artists was through the illustrations of children's books. At the age of ten, her mother gave her Grimm's Household Tales, illustrated by Mervyn Peake, whose work she loved, and she instantly wanted to be an artist like him. She later befriended Peake and his wife in London, and he became an important mentor in her work. She was also later inspired by meeting Stanley Spencer and Henry Moore.

She studied at Lancaster College of Art, and later Wimbledon College of Art. She admired the work of outsider artists, and described the work of a patient in the hospital, Billy Adams, that she loved: 'They were realistic paintings, but they were untaught… they were glowing, they were like gems.'

Mabel was thrifty and used recycled objects in her work, including toilet seats, old mirrors and beautiful jewellery which she crafted from the aluminium of an old caravan into the shape of horses. Her wood carvings are intense, illustrative and colourful. She was drawn to celebrities, animals, beasts, folk tales and biblical stories. She repeats certain symbols in her carvings, including the Tudor rose representing her Lancastrian upbringing.

Several of her carvings represent significant events in the life of the royal family, including Charles and Diana's wedding, the birth of their sons and the Queen's Jubilee.

The characters that haunt her carvings combine the playful with the profound. Some stories are represented several times using different colouring for the characters and animals portrayed. They appear to offer different versions of a tale or a person.

She was an outspoken activist in the anti-apartheid movement, frequently creating work with political messages. Her campaigning included advocacy for the LGBQT+ community, illustrated beautifully by Lovespoon for Lesbians and Homosexuals. Mabel also produced several small wooden sculptures. One of my favourites depicts Boy George in pink!

She notes tribal art, outsider and primitive art as some of her inspirations, and these influences appear especially strong in the relief work she produced, with tumbling creatures and people – particularly in the series Caradog and the Dogs. These carvings can be shown at any angle and resemble cave paintings. They are based on a story about a man, Caradog, who was knocked off his horse at Ty'n y Graig, near Ystrad Meurig after being pursued by dogs. He got into the stream to knock them off their scent, then came to the waterfall and over he went, to his doom. She made several different interpretations of the story, recycling an old bread board to carve one version.

As Mabel grew older and developed arthritis it became more difficult for her to carve, and she moved into drawing. She drew images of everyday life in Aberystwyth using biro, on A5 postcards with a slightly shaky hand. These wonderful drawings were donated to Ceredigion Museum and the National Library of Wales, along with her archive of correspondence. The National Library of Wales also has some rare self-portraits of the artist.

Mabel was fascinated by the story of the 'Leg of Bont', a gravestone in Strata Florida churchyard, which says 'herein lies the leg of Henry Hughes, 1756.' She found out that Henry Hughes was a cooper who had been run over by a stagecoach in the village. She said 'and what the first aid was I don't like to think but it involved tarring the leg... and [he] carried on his trade as a cooper. In Nova Scotia!' The village buried the leg. There are several variations of the tale, but it clearly fascinated Mabel – perhaps because of her own car accident – and she created this wood carving inspired by the story.

Mabel died in 2013, a year after her retrospective at Ceredigion Museum, leaving an important legacy as a pioneering eco-artist, feminist and activist. She was fearless in standing up to oppression and supporting the underdog, and persistent in pursuing her ambition to make art, while also living with pain for most of her life. Her life and career are particularly relevant today, at a time when arts education is at risk, and disabled artists continue to face multiple barriers to making their work.

Alice Briggs, artist and curator

Many of Mabel's woodcarvings can be found at Plascrug Leisure Centre in Aberystwyth. Her work is held in the collections of the Crafts Council, The National Library of Wales, the Centre for Alternative Technology and Ceredigion Museum

This content was supported by Welsh Government funding