I am a textile designer and maker, carefully crafting forms and textural surfaces that explore the boundaries between art and design. 

Though I grew up in the Yorkshire countryside, a degree in Textile Design at Chelsea College of Art led me to a formative period studying at the Swedish School of Textiles in Borås. I now base my practice in South East London as an awardee of ‘Make It’ at London’s leading studio for craftspeople: Cockpit Arts.

Underpinning my practice is a desire to explore and question the idea of drawing in its many forms. My hand-crafted textiles are often an extension of my paper-based creations and, when expressed tactile materials and carefully considered colour palettes, they adopt a new dimension and sense of tactility in their outcomes.

Work to date has explored many textile mediums and three-dimensional forms. Recently I have focused my explorations on tufting, a rug-making process perhaps best described as 'drawing with wool'. By hand-tufting through a cloth screen, I create distinctive forms and richly-textured, sculpted pile heights.

My practice is a journey centring around a series of relationships: the knowing capabilities of sight and emotive quality of touch, the connections between the worlds of fine art and functional craft, and the link between the design outcome of a piece and how it is received. 

My work aims to create a connection, intrigue, and curiosity within the viewer. Throughout my ever-evolving practice there is a desire to produce textured outcomes that explore colour and material through playful abstraction. Although my work displays lively experimentation, there are recurring shapes and distinctive colour palettes, giving the viewer a familiar thread by which to navigate them.

Lending integrity and further adding to the narrative of my pieces is my commitment to process-driven making. I am deeply involved in every stage of my practice, from initial concepts and ideas taken from first-hand experiences that speak to me, right through to drawings, colours, materials and the hand-making of pieces. I constantly find myself seeking the answer to how things are made and, in turn, wish to spark this questioning nature in my audience by showing the depths of my creative process.

Woven through these ideas is the exploration of how a line drawn on paper relates to a thread in a piece of textile, and how a textile piece might lay on the floor at home or hang on a gallery wall – adapting to its surroundings. Playing with the context of these pieces can determine our relationship with them, how we interact and form attachments to their qualities, based on our experiences and preconceptions. 

In particular, my textile pieces engage the viewer by making them question their true nature. The intention is for the viewer’s sight to be just a part of their experience of my work, as they realise that only seeing the piece is not enough: they must also know how it feels. Can I touch it?