Being But Men

The poem “Being but Men” by Dylan Thomas is a real favourite of mine. It describes the magic of childhood and how we lose a lot of that growing up.

This piece is a personal visual interpretation of that poem using textiles, which took me a considerable time to complete. I used a lot of stitches, beads, small pieces of fabric, all kinds of odds and ends. Some of those have real meaning, like a button of an old family sofa, for instance, or the clapper of a small ceramic bell that broke.

For now, this is my favourite piece. I loved every hour I worked on it, creating a world of abstract but tangible magic. Making something like this is like meditation more than anything.

Some details :

Mountains in my sketchbooks

We spent some time in the Austrian Alps this summer. I became a bit obsessed with the view seen through the window of our holiday home, kept drawing these mountains over and over.

Right now I'm thinking about ways to transfer these sketches to textile work.

Firewood Cap

I might have mentioned this before now and then 😅, but I love knitting small projects, like this hat. 

It’s the Firewood Cap, a design by Lindsey Fowler, and features in her fantastically beautiful book “Salt & Timber, knits from the Northern Coast”.

I used Soft Donegal, from the Irish company Donegal yarns.

Love the design, love the wool, love my new hat!

Passchendaele - The Old lie

I made some monoprints with paint and ink for a workshop led by Sue Hotchkis, which were the inspiration for this collaged piece about the First World War in Flanders. 

When visiting the World War I sites around Ieper and Passendale, I'm still shocked every time by the scale of the horrors memorialised there. The personal stories of fear and suffering are so deeply moving. ‘The war to end all wars’, as we know, sadly didn't turn out to be that, which is exactly what makes it still very relevant. 

Some details :