ARTIST STATEMENT

As a teacher of textiles for nearly twenty years, I have taught many traditional and contemporary textiles processes, naturally this exploration has fed into my own practice. Enjoying a myriad of techniques, I approach my own practice with an affinity for mixed media including printed textiles. I have an experimental approach to textiles, encompassing an array of materials that are resolved in both two and three dimensions. The term textile 'bricoleur' encompasses a breadth of approaches that I employ when utilising textiles in new ways aiming to explore material boundaries through a range of research methodologies.

Surface tactility and the multiple occupy the aesthetics of much of what I make. I am drawn to the beauty in worn surfaces that appear to visually reflect the passage of time. Eroded surfaces that afford slow emerging patinas creating an impermanent aesthetic, deeply resonate and provide limitless inspiration. The ancient Japanese philosophy, Wabi Sabi centres around the notion of transience and imperfection and these ideas have permeated my own over the past two years.

Recent works have emerged from the loss of my father that in turn led to following the path of a practice led research degree where I explored bereavement art. Using textiles materials, processes and form as vehicles for conveying the emotional state during loss, I created a final body of work for a Masters in Art-Textiles in the form of cylindrical weighty voids, using felt, recycled cotton, human hair and Jesmonite.