Artist’s Statement

I spend a lot of time with my Grandmother who is an avid craftswoman. Her hands are always stitching, sewing or embroidering something, and this has trickled down into my own practice. The use of sewing in my work pays homage to her, and her ideologies. This delicate lady who sits quietly at her machine is embodied by the patches of canvas that I paint onto, using the freedom of child-like mark-making without falling into the constricts of representational drawing. One of my biggest challenges as a painter is a constant battle between figuration and abstraction, exploring the importance of representing a thought or feeling in my work.

I use my whole body to create swirls and splatters on to the material. My paintings are created, and then deconstructed and transformed into new paintings by stitching these chopped up pieces of painted-on canvas. This set within me a chain of thought, that imagining and re-imagining is a perfect metaphor for how we all deal with memories and experiences. Bold colours and gestural marks challenge the ideas surrounding sewing and embroidery. I like to connect to the inner child in me and maintain a sense of joyful affirmation in my work, using colours and marks that are as free as how I used to paint as a child, with that comes a sense of freedom that is usually lost in day-to-day life. The outcome is always exciting for me as the shapes on the canvas turn into brand new marks all by themselves as I cut and rearrange them: paintings within paintings.

These fabric drawings are abstract yet still personal works, they retain allusions to the materials’ past incarnations. I have extended the technique to include clothes, paintings and other domestic material. They once filled a previous purpose and then transform into a different entity. Like a puzzle that has been rearranged but the pieces still fit happily together. Rozsika Parker in ‘The Subversive Stitch’ says ‘’revealing intimate details from personal life to engage the viewer with expressions of universal emotion’’. This quote applies as each piece of fabric holds a memory, and they have been woven and painted, deconstructed and constructed to transform into a combination of memories and domestic effects that gives new purpose as pieces of artwork.