“All That Remains -Thirty Years in the Making”
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The “All That Remains” body of work was created as a celebration of 30 years working as a textiles practitioner and acts as a milestone, repositioning my practice in a research context unconfined by the constraints of my commercial fashion print work.
Nostalgia, in the digital age, is a key focus in my work and through this I aim to reconnect and remember the precious fragments of my archive of family photographs. My context is an autobiographical narrative printed onto cloth, in which both physical photographic prints and digitally captured images are deconstructed and re-presented, the familiarity of which resonates and references one’s own values and connections with our past, present and future. In a societal context our connection to our past is rapidly diminishing as the materiality of our physical world and spoken word as communication are replaced with digital platforms. I aim to evoke a collective experience of nostalgia, to invite curiosity and discussion about the way we recall past memory, interact with digitally created images and consider the value of the physical artefact in a virtual world. The linking of past memories, people and experiences creates both an emotional response and empathy for one’s own personal story. I reference contemporary photographic theory which explores the influence of social media on human behaviour. Drawing on memory both real and imagined, fuelled by self-reflection and a relentless drive to experiment and create new work, the roots of my creativity are confronted, unravelled and exposed through print on cloth, the medium which first inspired me to create as a young child. The research outcomes, presented as a series of textiles art works, will be showcased at the Contemporary Applied Art Gallery in London and a One Man Show at the Ruthin Craft Centre in Denbighshire. As a digital settler, born in the late 1960s and with 30 years of analogue printed textiles experience, my approach to the use of Computer Aided Design is very different to a generation of younger digital native designers, who have never experienced a pre-digital existence. My lifelong passion for pattern and cloth combined with my work as a print designer have equipped me with an analogue tool kit, with which I explore the world of digital design. For over a decade I have pushed the boundaries of computer software in development of my work and in the pursuit of the highest quality digital print resolution available. With the of development of latest generation of digital printers, digitally printed textiles can now rival the quality of hand printing and even surpass it with the limitless opportunities it presents for creative expression. Digital production methods are often associated with mass production however my approach is more akin to that of a painter, building up complex surfaces and layers of imagery. My creative outputs are carefully crafted, honed, reworked and refined digital one-off pieces that demand fluency in the complex language of our digital world. Artist statement |
