JOURNAL

MY MATERIALS & TOOLS

I love to forage in treasure troves to find materials for collage and objects for mark making and prop styling. I have also collected and inherited, over many years, precious vintage fabrics and haberdashery from family, friends, and other sources. This has allowed me to gather up an expansive assortment of oddities and curiosities of new and vintage cloths, laces, fibres, threads, buttons, zips, sewing bits and bobs, colourful textural papers and so much more. Everything carefully sorted and colour coordinated in my studio, offering me endless supplies on hand.

 My trusty tools such as paintbrushes most handmade by me, pens, pencils, cutting tools, and printing devices such as mono-printing recycled glass plates, hand-carved wooden blocks from India, hand cut stencils and unusual objects are all used to create unique marks on a surface. All of this is a plethora of materials and tools to play and experiment with.

 I will always assess a material or object before throwing it away, observing it, and asking myself, how can this be re-used or made into something new? Or it may have an unusual or interesting shape or pattern that can be transferred onto another surface by using a specific printing technique.

 I would like to give a big shout out to my reliable sewing machines, the Sewline industrial machine and my Brother sewing machine that has over 560 different sewing stitches, that I tediously sew & crazy stitch with, attaching multiple textured layers together. The investment into these machines has been invaluable to my art practice for fabricating big and small artworks.