Artist statement

I am an artist and mother from Cornwall. I come from a line of creative craftswomen who have all used alternative materials in the arts to create narrative works. My mother is a wooden automata maker, and my grandmother was a ceramicist. They both used their work to tell stories and escape the humdrum with humour and a touch of the absurd. In this, our work is linked.

My methods do not sit solely within the traditional notion of “fine art”, but draw elements from illustration, textiles and craft. Beginning with linear drawings and painting, I use fabric of different weights, textures and age, hand dying, layering and hand stitching to create narrative and decorative works. I have always used painting as a tool for experimentation in my composition of textile pieces, but in recent years it has become a second, distinct medium for me. I no longer paint purely to inform my textiles work but find instead they inform, and enrich, each other.

I view my work as a visual outlet for dialogues that exist within myself and wider society. Handling humanistic themes, I use characters loosely gleaned from Cornish folk tales and my own life to tell stories that exist within my community as it is now. It is at once comment on self, place and the interrelation between the two.