IMAGINED LANDSCAPES

I think with my hands, exploring how the different tactile qualities of fibres and surfaces can be hand-worked to express ideas and concepts in 2 and 3 dimensions. Here print and stitch combine with experimental surfaces made from scratch.

I might start by making filaments of thread. These develop into various construction techniques, or multi-faceted surfaces, each with its own feel. For example surfaces that are floaty, rigid, transparent, opaque, or manipulated by folding, tearing, cutting for example: a creative, hands-on building process reflecting elements of the story contained in each fresh work.

Ideas for Imagined landscapes evolved through the making of small pieces of papers, cloth and fibre moving on into textured patches suggesting a landscape. By process of elimination, selective surfaces combined into a larger work, tied together visually with a limited palette of colour, hinting at a wild landscape, drawing both viewer and maker into an imagined landscape.

Made from re-purposed, re-cycled, re-imagined organic and mostly natural surfaces, Imagined Landscapes exploits the tactile qualities of handmade surfaces to evoke a virtual landscape, a piece you might walk through (visually). Surfaces change, as in a journey through time and space in harmony with nature. This is the beginnings of a new body of work for 2024.

Imagined Landscapes 170cms in length and 70cms wide. From the base to the uppermost layers. These are the media and materials used. The base is gold painted Lutrador, next a layer of gauze, followed by a layer of handmade silk papers using various silk fibres, stitched to the previous layers with cotton thread. Each of the four “patches of landscape” have a bark cloth base with printed and painted papers machine and hand stitched into relief surfaces of different heights