I have always loved fabrics, particularly vintage cloth. Whether printed, woven, thread bare, patched or plain, each piece comes with a story: a narrative woven into its wear and age, carrying memories of different uses and lives lived.
I love the spontaneity of cutting into a length of fabric, playing with it, creating shapes, adding other colours, just as one would mix paints. I find it fascinating too how moods and even representative images can be found in these materials. The raw hem of an old red silk slip becomes the horizon in an abstract piece called “First light’. A vintage Japanese sack originally used for straining unrefined sake, becomes the fields in ‘After the Plough’, and in the still life ‘Faded Memories ” the beakers are cut from the floral fabrics I discovered hidden inside the remains of an 18th century French bedcover.
A new picture always starts with a single piece of fabric. It’s the seed of the picture and where the story begins. It might be the tiniest cotton fragment from a dress, or a strip of old linen, heavy with indigo dye and stains.
I then gather other fabrics that complement the seed fabric, and from here the narrative unfolds, taking me either towards an abstract, sometimes evoking landscape, or a still-life often depicting simple objects.
Shapes are built by overlapping layers of fabric, and I like to incorporate any original stitching – this might be patching, darning or simple hand stitching, as well as age marks – fading, fold lines, and seam edges.
My landscape pictures are usually inspired by the different seasons, in particular winter. On winter walks, with no distraction of spring blossom, summer lushness, or autumn colour, I think a lot about scale and the shape of things – the vastness of the sky over the patchwork of tiny fields, the lone oak in a flooded meadow, and the last of the light on the hill as another day passes.
In my quiet still-life fabric paintings I am thinking about domestic scenes, the magic of the everyday, and my love of collecting crockery – cups, pots, vases, bottles, plates and much more; mixing and matching eclectic patterns and shapes, new and old.
Finding the ‘seed fabric’ can be challenging and time consuming, but always opens up endless possibilities. Something that seems unpromising, such as an old French quilt, dirty and worn with age, once unpicked, can reveal layers and layers of fabric, each one older than the last revealing a joyous selection of patterns – plaids, stripes, abstracted florals, sometimes the same pattern but in a different colour way. The innermost layer and I presume the original cover, can be so worn that it is almost like tissue paper.
For most of my pictures, in particular for the background or the wallpaper in a still life, I look for rough utilitarian fabrics – hemp, jute, linen or even a painter’s dust sheet – the more splattered with paint the better.These fabrics are all chosen to emphasise the sense of domesticity and the everyday, as well as the passing of time. Sometimes I deliberately chose the reverse side of a printed fabric, preferring the lack of clarity of pattern which adds a little mystery to the picture, or to push the narrative in a different direction by manipulating fabrics with dyes, paint, and bleach.
Whether the picture is a composition of tonal subtlety or a more joyous mix of colours, an abstract or a simple still life, they all convey stillness and a quiet moment; another fleeting incident in the life of a piece of fabric.
Before I became a full time artist, I worked for many years as a stylist, art director and writer in lifestyle and interiors. 
To see some of my work and for more information click here to visit my previous website.