JOURNAL

RESTORATIVE PRACTICE

I have a deep appreciation and love for the natural landscape, harnessing the handmade and finding beauty in the imperfection. I prefer to use reclaimed materials, botanical dyes, and natural paints whenever I can. This eco-friendly ethos of making means up to 80-90% of my materials I use are reclaimed or recycled from various sources, embracing a gentle approach on the environment.

Processing dyes and natural earth pigments from the natural world is paramount to my practice. I use plant dyeing to extract colours from seasonal plants which are obtained from my dye garden or foraged and collected from wild sources. I apply my preferred dying techniques and recipes that I have acquired and continue to experiment with, to obtain a vibrant array of limitless colour possibilities to transform natural fabrics & fibres into precious rare pieces for larger works. I use low volatile organic compounds (VOC) hand-made paints and process earth pigments for natural water-based paints, pastels, charcoals, and inks, to obtain particular colour combinations.

 My fine art print designs are printed on 100% cotton rag 310gsm paper made from cloth offcuts, a more environmentally sound choice. My textile designs are printed onto natural fibres and fabrics using non-toxic, solvent free, water-based pigment inks. All printing is sourced locally, running low impact sustainable practices, where the aim is to only print what is required.

I further love to experiment with salvaging old clothes/lace and linen that provides a material link to the past. This is a very intimate art form where I gently unpick the once worn garment or used cloth and re-work, re-assemble and re-stitch the pieces to form something completely new. This artform interests me greatly, and is one that I continue to immerse myself in.

 All of this is a restorative practice for me…that has and continues to teach me so much about: loss to reclamation, despair to deliverance and deprivation into beauty.