Category: Art Textiles
-
Nature connection and colour
—
by
Exploring green in the garden During my first nature-based residency in 2023, I read that humans can see more variations of green than of any other colour. That’s because we evolved to live in green places, needing to identify plants and food. I developed a lovely activity to explore this, using threads in many shades…
-
Stitching The Garden
—
by
Nature-inspired embroidery workshop in Mill Field Forest Garden on 8th August I keep saying I am going to stop running workshops but I can’t resist one more in the wonderful community garden I help to run. I was artist in residence here 2024-2025 and I still find it endlessly inspiring and I want to share…
-
Fragments of a whole
—
by
What we lose when we cut things up As I prepare for my annual visit to the Antique Textiles Fair next week, I look back to a visit a couple of years ago and reflect on what I found, and what was missing. I crawled out of bed horribly early, in the dark, to get…
-
Hand & Heart – announcing my new project
In the darkest days of November, I worked really hard on a funding application to Arts Council England to expand The Victorian Hand project and enable me to work with more people. It was a long wait over the winter until I finally heard back in mid-March and now the project is getting started. Over…
-
Making Connections
—
by
My own textile work alongside Mary Linwood’s In August, before the Mary Linwood exhibition opened, I took all the work I had made for the exhibition for a photo shoot in St Margaret’s Church, Leicester. This is the church where Mary Linwood is buried and it seemed like the perfect atmospheric location for me to…
-
Emily Jo Gibbs: Making Meaning Podcast Episode 58
I’m so pleased to share this conversation with Emily Jo Gibbs, a fantastic textile maker who I have admired for many years. It won’t surprise you that I love Emily’s work and we had a really interesting, broad-ranging conversation about the why behind the work. Emily is a British artist who has established an international reputation…
-
The Generosity of Makers
A reflection on being a generous artist and being part of generous communities A second essay copied over from Substack, where I am taking part in a summer essay-writing challenge hosted by Beth Kempton. This week’s prompt was Generosity. This is not the writing I planned over the course of this week. This is not…
-
Textiles and Care: Making Meaning podcast Episode 46
—
by
Series Five of Making Meaning is here. A lot of this series will be focussing on textiles, although there will be some other stories, conversations and solo episodes coming up too. This week I am starting by sharing two of my talks from the Cultures of Care Group from the end of 2024. Cultures of…
-
Mary Linwood and Me: Making Meaning podcast Episode 45
—
by
This short episode is a brief introduction to my research project about 18th century embroidery artist Mary Linwood. The episode includes a very short history about her, and then details of the community projects I’m running over the next few months, that you can take part in too.
-
Stitching Emotions: call for contributions
Stitching Emotions is a new contributory project to make a piece for a large fabric book to be exhibited in my exhibition ‘Mary Linwood: Art, Stitch & Life’ in Sept 2025. We don’t know Mary Linwood’s feelings about her embroidery practice but she must have loved stitching. Women’s experiences in history are rarely recorded and…