1. Tell us about your practice and what led you down your chosen path as a maker.
My journey into weaving started with the serendipitous gift of a beautiful Swedish floor loom. After researching how to put it together and how it worked, I spent some time at a weaving school in New England where students were taught on looms the same as mine. It was here that I was introduced to weaving with linen and the possibility of growing and processing flax. I duly started to grow about 10 square metres of flax on my allotment plot. This is enough to process on a small scale and to enjoy all parts of the process, the exquisite blue flowers and golden seed heads, some of which find their way into my sculptural weaves.
After many years working as a university academic, I gradually reduced my hours to enable me to set up my weaving studio and have been weaving full time for a few years now.
2. Tell us about your materials.
As well as growing flax, I’m also helping to renovate a willow garden within an old walled garden. One year after cutting back the overgrown trees, I’ve been able to cut willow rods in a range of different bark colours to use in my loom-woven paper and linen sculptures.
The yarns used in my pieces include undyed tow linen, luxurious Japanese paper yarn, and a Japanese silk-wrapped yarn.
3. Can you share more about the process behind your Collect 2024 collection?
The vessels that I’m showing at Collect are handwoven on my traditional Swedish floor loom in my Burntisland studio.
Once off the loom, the vessels are stitched together and willow rods, sometimes stripped of their bark, are woven into the cloth to provide structure and form. Willow bark strips are sometimes woven as decorative wefts as well.
I am drawn to the form of the willow rods and allow their natural curve to inform the shape of the vessel, making what the materials suggest and learning from the materials themselves.
4. What inspired the collection that you are presenting at Collect 2024?
The underpinning theme of the collection is the activity of gathering. Sometimes useful fibres like flax and willow, but also gathering natural objects simply because they captivate our interest in some way or another, and because we find them beautiful. For example, returning from a walk with a pocket or bag full of pebbles, seed heads, pieces of slate or fossils.
The inspiration for the vessels comes from the materials and two themes: the importance of cloth in everyday living and the idea of gathering and collecting as an inherent facet of being human.
5. Tell us about your approach to sustainable making in this work.
There’s something very important to the experience of sustainability and regenerative textiles within my creative practice, and that is seeing the maker as part of an ecological cycle. In the growing and cultivation, gathering and processing of natural materials, recognising their inherent grace and beauty as well as function, and using the materials imaginatively in the development of new work.
6. What do you hope the viewer will take away from this work?
The intention behind these pieces is to provide a contemporary response to essential aspects of humanity.
Scotland’s landscape has inspired artists and makers for centuries, and makers, both contemporary and from the past have used Scotland's natural harvest in their work. Scotland has a great tradition of weaving and it's a real joy to be able to contribute to this, inspire new weavers and contribute to the debate about how we as humans interact with our environment.
