European Memoirs
During the 3 years I spent living and travelling in Europe and the UK I took many photographs of beautiful scenery but I also discovered many lovely details. Patterns from the wall paper in our bathroom in the flat in Edinburgh, the remnant of old wallpaper that wasn’t papered over because a phone was mounted to the wall, a new phone installed revealing this floral delight. The sketched buildings of a German town on the paper bag that my postcards came in or the pattern on a book found in an old shed on a farm in East Sussex. These are little prizes you find when you travel, you bring them home as keepsakes, take them out and look at them from time to time and remember where you were when you found them, the atmosphere of the day, the weather, the sense of place comes back to you. In turn the images of the landscape you travelled through is imbued with such memories, what you were doing that day, new places discovered, treasures uncovered. European Memoirs is about bringing these two elements together in one work, the detail of a place stitched into the landscape in which it was discovered.
Winter Longing
The winters in Scotland are long, cold and colourless, each day is experienced in a range of greys and browns. The trees and shrubs are asleep and the plants have retreated to the safety of the ground. This work expresses the longing of one has for colour, for leaves, for flowers, for new growth for any sign that the winter is over and new life will once again return.
Tray Cloths Exhibition
The Tray Cloth series brings together images I have taken in the last few years of mostly my own garden and occasionally families gardens that I have a spent some time in and also a selection of tray cloths from a much wider collection spread throughout the family.
Photographing plants is pure indulgence, I can never tire at looking at plants as the closer you look the more you see. The beauty, intricacy, colour and form of plants and their flowers is what leads me to pick up my camera over and over. Natures ability to put together colour combinations and patterns has been a source of inspiration for much of my own painting and designs. My fascination with nature means I intensely enjoy the Arts and Crafts designs, Lalique’s Jewellery, Art Nouveau and of course embroidery which is so often depicting nature.
I am lucky enough to have a treasure trove of embroidery designs, cottons and an array of embroidered tray cloths from a collection that was once the stock of my Great Aunties Haberdashery shop in Invercargill. I have taken the designs from these tray cloths and matched them to the images of plants. These are designs that deserve to be seen and experienced again without the inconvenience of washing tray cloths or even figuring out what to do with them. There has been so much investment in their making and they would have brought an essence of nature so much in contrast to their artificial environment they deserve to be seen again.
Embroidering depictions of nature upon representations of nature is like nature squared, it’s me saying wow how great is nature, it’s just insanely clever and beautiful, I am constantly in awe of nature, this is my ode to nature.
