Family Stories

How I use my own and others’ family histories and and objects in my work

Pieces from Tool Shed, my grandad’s tools, stitched onto his handkerchiefs.

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Family histories, memorials, personal collections and individual stories have been part of my practice for a long time, since I first worked with my grandad’s tools and handkerchiefs in 2012. There’s a chapter in Tangled; Textile Stories of Care & Connection exploring this theme of family and personal histories. It’s one I come back to time and again because it is such a rich and rewarding way of working. Like many, I love researching my own family tree and find out things about my ancestors that I would never have known otherwise but this is rarely the starting point for my own work. For my textile practice, I am usually object-focussed, meaning that I create work with or about the objects I have inherited, have been passed down to me or sometimes, about objects that are lost or missing.

Textiles have such strong associations

with domesticity, personal lives

and family memory that they

are the perfect means to express

emotional stories.

I am often inspired by personal

stories, by history, memory or historic

places and some of those narratives

can be sad or troubling. Other times

working with personal memories

to commemorate a loved one can

be cathartic and also joyful. 

This book assembles a long-term

body of work exploring care and

connection expressed through my

deeply thoughtful and emotionally-

engaged textile making. My work

references loss, memory, fragility and

damage in both the cloth itself and in

our personal lives.

Find out more in my new book, available for pre-order now with £2 discount.

First in a series of posts exploring elements of Tangled and giving tasters of the book’s contents and quotes from the text. Read more about the book here or in the following posts

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