Pat Bloor was born in 1956 and grew up in Chingford, London. She studied fine art, first in Walthamstow and then at Winchester School of Art from which she graduated in 1978. Throughout the 1980s Pat Bloor developed her print-making and began exploring a more craft-orientated, decorative approach to art.
Pat drew inspiration from contemporary Egyptian tapestries and in 1990 began learning to weave, as an addition to her art and design teaching in adult education and the health service. From 2000 until 2002 she chose to work as part of a small team of weavers based at the West Dean Studio, Chichester, in Sussex, weaving a large tapestry designed by Philip Sanderson for Portcullis House, Westminster. The increasingly severe effects of a long term depressive illness dominated Pat Bloor's last years.
Pat continued to produce tapestries both as commissions and as independent works. In early 2003 she started work with a Waltham Forest community-based weaving project and continued there until the summer when crippling depression forced her to leave. Tragically on 29th September 2003 Pat took her own life.
Pat's eldest daughter, Kate Jennings, with her associate Jessica Green, formed the Pat Bloor Association in August 2004. They drew together a Management Committee and began the process of seeking logistical support, sponsorship and fundraising towards the production of a high quality catalogue of Pat's weavings. Shortly before this, Kate Jennings had begun to develop a proposal with the William Morris Gallery to hold an exhibition of the Pat Bloor tapestries.
A high quality catalogue of Pat Bloor's works is available from the Pat Bloor Association, price £10.99. This can be bought on the internet by visiting: www.patbloorassociation.com
The address is 65A Grange Park Road, Leyton, London, E10 5ER.

In 2002 Pat Bloor described her motivation:
"I use drawing and painting as a way of looking and recording. I draw people, domestic objects, views from a window, anything that catches my attention. I also make pictures from my imagination if they appear in my thoughts and are insistent and clear enough to be transformed into a drawing. From these sketchbooks I develop images that I then weave into tapestries. I see tapestry as a form of building and myself as an artist who tells stories. I start with empty, vertical threads and weave across with mixes of coloured yarns which slowly develop into a finished piece."

In 1993 Pat stated:
"Tapestry weaving is a slow, steady and thoughtful process. A single tapestry may take several months to weave. The length of time involved allows ideas to gradually develop and mature as the fabric and images are built up thread by thread."

Pat was closely associated with The Handweavers Studio at 29 Haroldstone Road, London, E17 7AN. She attended workshops run by William Jefferies in which "she absorbed techniques and explored qualities of woven description. She was able to produce highly personal work and also applied her skills and commitment to a series of private commissions".
William Jefferies adds: "It is always a challenge to work on somebody else's designs after a creative lifetime of being 'the artist'. Submission to a large-scale general image means subduing an element of this most precious mode of expression. It was at West Dean Tapestry Studio that Pat came to a kind of resolution in tapestry through her experience of working collaboratively with other weavers on the Portcullis House commission. Working to a design by Philip Sanderson, she had to interpret his bleak, blue-toned northern landscapes. In particular, it was the subtle horizon of scrubby trees that set her a challenge to which she rose with skill and vision.
"The structural balance of hatching and yarn-mixed colours, learned at West Dean, resulted in a poised quality of interpretation which would resonate in her last works. The Last Frog is a fine example of how Pat absorbed those skills and influences."