Follow the thread (Part 1)…
Timing is everything…in art and in life…and I often find that some ideas need to wait for particular conditions to be fully realised. I can have a niggling notion of an idea for years and bash my head against it in different ways (sometimes many, many times over) before the right conditions align and the proper, workable form of the idea suddenly becomes apparent and all fits together.
In the aftermath of this final idea manifestation, I’ll find myself looking at what I’ve done and think: OF COURSE. That is so OBVIOUS…NOW…
Using textiles and embroidery in my art has been one of those ideas that has taken its own good time to emerge.
I’ve always been drawn to using stitching and thread, but have spent years tussling and tinkering with how to use it in a way that felt right, and just never quite solving how to do it.
As it turns out, multiple threads needed to come together (see what I did there…? NOT SORRY) to create the right conditions for these embroidery works to emerge.
One of these threads was DRAWING.
Drawing was not a major part of my practice (except in the scribble and sketch phase) for many years. However, during that seemingly eternal span of time across 2020-21, drawing became a really accessible way for me to keep creating art with what I could get my hands on.
Creating these drawings and applying mark after tiny mark, renewed my taste for this (extremely masochistic, yet soothingly meditative) repetitive mark-making, but also left me frustrated with the fragility of works on paper, and the limitations when it came to the intensity of colour I could achieve.
I am not the most delicate of people (meticulous sometimes, delicate no) and I need my artwork to be pretty robust to withstand my handling. Works on paper just did not seem to have the fortitude to go the distance. They were (sorry to all you drawing people out there..) too wussy. I had to be too cautious with them, I needed something I could bung around a bit.
And I hated having to put the finished pieces behind glass, that sense of a barrier established in the cold distance it created between the work and the viewer.
So I was looking for a way to create this repetitive mark-making, use beautiful colours and work with something that could handle being handled by me…mmm…
Coming up in Follow the thread (Part 2)… how an ordinary (or extraordinary) cushion cover became another catalyst for the threads…
To be the first to know: SUBSCRIBE to my mailing list