I am primarily a Woven Textile Artist, but I also enjoy the process of design and the physicality of making. Reaching beyond the vertical and horizontal constraints of the loom, my ideas are explicated, refined, and communed through the cloth. My practice seeks to encapsulate the essence of a time and place and translate memory through an exploration of light, colour and form in the natural world.My work is conceptually driven, usually beginning with research and photography, and developed through drawings and a written record of observations. I use natural fibres and naturally dyed materials that reflect the environment and often incorporate elements foraged directly from the landscape. Specialising in the Theo Moorman inlay technique has provided an artistic aesthetic to my work through which I have been able to explore the boundary between art and craft.Recent works have investigated themes of light and transparency, paralleled with personal explorations of grief and loss. My graduate collection, ‘Light on Light’, explores the transitory nature of light, and through three interconnected woven pieces, communicates the ways in which light is perceived as colour - ‘Scattered’, ‘Reflected’ and ‘Refracted’. Inspired by the Bauhaus Colour Theory, I developed the collection in collaboration with Dr Jonathan Kennedy, Research Fellow, School of Maths and Physics, Queens’s University, Belfast. Through this collaboration I was able to translate the concept of light, not only artistically through colour and form, but as an accurate scientific representation.
