About me:
I currently describe myself as a Textile Artist, though I have a career history that includes industrial textile design and education. After redefining my work whilst successfully completing an MA in Textiles at WSA in 2011, I have been concentrating on making my own work and exhibiting with ‘Prism’ group of Textile Artists (currently exhibiting at Whitstable Museum and Art Gallery till January). I am also working towards a solo and joint exhibitions at the Theatre Royal Winchester and The Nature of Mending project with Walford Mill, Wimborne.
I like to work with stiff, delicate, fabrics that are stitched, punched, etched and bonded with paper to subvert the surface. Metals and patination are a reoccurring theme, as is text either as a motif or a literary starting point. The vulnerability of children featured in literature has been a rich seam of inspiration for me, as a mother I’ve wondered at the questionable situations many of these characters have to conquer. Recent, largely figurative work, has explored the use of freehand machine embroidery to mimic the marks made in my drawings.
News:
of Anna Freud whose ground breaking work with children is still held in high esteem as a starting point for my work on I am thrilled to be working on the ‘Nature of Mending’ project with Walford Mill, for which I am using Anna Freude's ground breaking work with bereaved children as a starting point. Freud observed how the ego wards off displeasure or anxiety in children and how the transference of affection to the friends of bereaved children becomes a channel for healing.
I envisage much of the work to be built up by layers of translucent materials; the emotional void or emerging consciousness within a narative could be represented as shadows or negative spaces within the pieces. I’m particularly interested in developing the work I’ve started using gum Arabic lithography and paper bonded to metal mesh for this project, both of which will continue my experiments with surface patina giving the fabric an ethereal ghostly quality.
