Inspiration and personal work
| For many years, the people, culture and landscape of Southern Africa have fired my imagination and inspired my work. Travel and journeys have always been an important part of my life. These together with memories and common bonds that connect people, however remote, often spark off ideas for my own work. | |
| The people of Southern Africa inspire me with their natural grace, elegance and dignity demonstrated in their strong family ties, pride in their traditions, practical skills and culture. I admire their resourceful and innovative use of materials and enjoy some of the unexpected combinations of simple everyday items. | |
| Regular visits to southern Africa have been a constant source of inspiration and focus for my own work in recent years. Journeys into more remote areas of Namibia and Tanzania provide a feast of wonderful experiences and visual images of vast spaces, colours, pattern and textures. I love combining hand stitching with hand dyed and coloured fabric, paper together with mixed media and sometimes found objects. These are developed into stitched textiles to record ideas about the people and places I visit. | |
| Small communities of Himba in Kaokoland, Namibia and Maasai in Tanzania have welcomed us into their villages and homes. Experiencing and sharing in the lives of these people has been fun, enlightening and a great privilege. Africa bombards the senses and of course, colour, texture, pattern and form have all had a great impact on my visual ideas. It is also the people; their way of life and culture that has had a great influence on my thinking and way of working. Exposure to cultures so different from my own has heightened my awareness of the quality and diversity of ‘materials’. I continue to be actively involved in a community project with some small groups in Kaokoland, an isolated area of Namibia. The project encourages women and girls to make baskets for sale, promotes their craft skills and enables them to generate income for their communities and become more self reliant. | |
| I accepted a commission to design and make a chasuble, two stoles and chalice veil for St Wulfram’s Parish Church in Grantham to be used with an existing frontal. They are in keeping with the Victorian frontal of 1890’s depicting some of the motifs in the original frontal in a contemporary way. The pieces combine something of the present with traditions of the past. | |
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I feel very passionately that our craft skills should be valued and passed on to the next generation. An invitation to study pieces from the textile collection at the Bankfield Museum gave me an ideal opportunity to follow my interest in our own embroidery heritage. 19th and early 20th century needlework samples and practice pieces were the basis for my contribution to Not What it Seams an exhibition by the PSG inspired by the Bankfield collection.
The high degree of craft skills and investment of care and time are celebrated in Practice Makes Perfect, a contemporary sample book celebrating past and continuing textile traditions. |
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I have always enjoyed the making and constructing process and have spent time working in a bookbinders studio learning the craft of bookbinding.
During a visit to India I was amazed by the skills of the silk brocade weavers and glass bead makers and could not resist bringing some silk and beads back with me. I used these to make a series of hand bound books. |
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| These skills are becoming absorbed into my way of working and were an important feature of A Fine Line and also in the presentation of Buttoned Up, which was awarded the Coats Craft Award for Surface Design. | |
| A Fine Line, selected for 'art of the STITCH', makes links between text and textiles. The book form acknowledges the passing on of needlework skills from one generation to another. The hand bound book includes printed images and text on linen, damask, organdy, and calico, with trimmings, buttons and hand stitching. |
