Interview to the artist by Rachelle Gryn Brettler, from our Anniversary Book
As I am not textile trained, sometimes my approach can be a bit naive.That is why I love hand-sewing as there is a sense of freedom in it because it is only the needle and thread, and you have complete control over the cloth.
The process of hand stitching takes ages. It is very meditative, slow. It is the calm after the storm following the decision-making and trying to grapple to create an image that you have in your mind. But it is actually physically demanding. It is a pleasurable experience if you are doing it very slowly, but because I am often working to a deadline, it is a physical and a mental endurance test – if your focus is off, it is difficult to get into a rhythm.
It is never a planned end result, but compositionally, I think they do end up looking quite formal. What triggers that investigation is often the discovery or unearthing of something, whether that is an object, an image, a sensory experience. It may be a pigment that has come from a plant that I have grown or that has grown well that particular year, or a foraged clay, or a wild tone of ochre... all of those things are triggers for wanting to pursue an idea. The pursuing of an idea, or an ephemeral sense of being or feeling – that is quite an abstract way of working. It is also very intuitive because you are piecing one thing to another, you can cut into it, or take it apart, or move things around. It is a collage, an assemblage process of constructing an image.
I work with pigments in two ways: dyes, which are very fluid, along with solid earth and mineral pigments. Two very different ways of working with natural colour. The dyes come from living things – plants and trees, predominantly – some I grow myself. I have quite an emotional connection to those plants, whether that is about site specificity, or whether it is about the nurturing of the plant from seed to full growth, and knowledge that I want to then use that harvest from that year for a particular colour or a particular piece. From wood tannin – you get this extraordinary nuanced, subtle palette from different tree species – every tree has a different expression of colour. Earth pigments, again, that is really by chance, I do not ever go out on a hunt to specifically find something. It is far more about an encounter in nature, that directness of that moment in time where you encounter something, or it is unear thed in front of you.
The relationship to a material is not just about its colour, it is about its history, it is about how it formed; it is far more about the wider dialogue around that material.The colour is just the expression of place or a site. I do not dream a colour and then try and find it, it comes to me.They will sit in the studio until it is the right time, something tells me that I am going to work with this today.
Calico is where I started because it is a lighter weight version of artist’s canvas. As my background was painting and I used to make and stretch my canvases, it was just a cloth. I love the fact that it is natural, undyed, with flecks of the cotton husk still in it. It is a plain weave so it is quite stable, with so much potential. Now I work with as much reclaimed fabric as I can: old bedsheets, old linens, a lot of domestic textiles that have reached the end of their life in a domestic capacity, then I get this amazing feeling because these fabrics have lived their life already. I am often piecing one neutral to another with the subtleties that are going on there. Also, if you are applying pigment or dye to cloth that has had a life before, it takes up dye unevenly – something chemically is going on that is an imprint or a trace of its previous life.There is a joy of being able to actually piece something from nothing in a way – building an image out of these disparate elements that often have the scars or marks of those previous lives. Historically quilts and patchwork are a record of time, place and memory and you can sew in the past, the future and present all into one piece.