Artist profile
I am a contemporary community textile artist working collaboratively with people and place, primarily in Derbyshire and the wider Midlands. My practice is driven by a sustained curiosity about small, often overlooked things: everyday gestures, materials, words and moments, and what can emerge when we take time to notice them together.
Alongside my artistic practice, I currently work as a Creative Listener, embedded within participatory and community programmes. This role involves walking alongside people and projects, paying close attention to how learning, agency and change take shape over time. Rather than directing outcomes, I am interested in understanding process, relationship and the quieter forms of knowledge that often sit outside formal evaluation.
My current practice includes the Riddings Community Flax Project, a long term, place based initiative rooted in growing, processing and working with flax alongside local people. Through shared making, storytelling and material exploration, the project reconnects contemporary community life with local heritage, while creating space for collective reflection and participation. This work continues to shape how I think about sustainability, patience and shared ownership within community contexts.
Much of my work sits within participatory settings, where creativity becomes a shared process rather than an individual outcome. I am particularly interested in how gentle, attentive making can build connection, confidence and understanding in places shaped by layered social and industrial histories. I believe strongly that we are stronger together, and that creative work can offer a quiet but meaningful way of holding space for collective experience.
Creativity, for me, is a form of attention. Working with textiles allows emotions, memories and stories to surface through material and process. I am drawn to slow, responsive methods where materials are allowed to behave as they will, and where there is no expectation of perfection. In this way, making becomes reflective rather than corrective, and learning happens through doing.
As a carbon sensitive, carbon literate artist, I often work with donated, reused and discarded materials. Many projects begin not with a fixed outcome, but with a question and a limited set of resources. This constraint is not a barrier but an invitation, encouraging adaptability, shared decision making and creative problem solving. My practice frequently involves weaving, hand and machine embroidery, stitching and mixed media approaches, alongside techniques introduced or chosen by the communities I am working with.
Collaboration is central to everything I do. I am motivated by working alongside others to explore the value of what is usually overlooked, whether that is a material, a memory or a quiet contribution. Through this shared exploration, I aim to support the creation of community artworks and processes that invite conversation, foster pride and reflect the richness of lived experience.
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