In September 2020 I made the excellent decision (well done, past-me) of enrolling on the Textiles Foundation year at Morley College in South London. Two days a week for almost a year, I cycled to Waterloo, where I was inspired and guided to try new techniques and explore work from conception to construction. The end result was a project titled Masked Vanities, which explored our notion of vanity and the need for humans to recognise themselves in others.
Once the course had ended I immediately enrolled in the Advanced course, beginning in September 2021…and also immediately discovered that I was pregnant with our second child. As with my first pregnancy I struggled hugely with fatigue and nausea throughout the first and second trimester, and began to find it increasingly difficult to focus on the work I was making, a slightly meandering project loosely based around mushrooms and organic forms. Before long, I had abandoned both the course and my textiles work.
Only once my son was born did I feel capable of attempting to make work once more, and even then it was with a great deal of exhaustion, unmotivation and a lack of time and energy. Picking my unfinished project back up, I suddenly saw with clarity what this work was actually about: a way to explore the sensation of personal stagnation that I feel comes with motherhood.
During pregnancy I was struck with this intense feeling of somehow being outside of time and space, as though the world was rushing on and I was staying absolutely still - so still that the earth could begin to grow over my feet, moss and mushrooms and lichen spreading across my skin. Contrasting with the intense growth of the child within me - now ears, now spleen, now fingernails, now tiny, individual eyelashes - I felt a sense of real, for want of a better word, discombobulation.
I am incredibly proud of the work in this series, representing as it does not only the emotionally space that I inhabit but the very real struggle for the time and energy to make any kind of coherent work. As an illustrator my art in the past has often been vey figurative, and to work in a conceptual manner for the first time in my life is both liberating and frightening.
You can find my textiles work here on my website. I will also be exhibiting at the Textiles Foundation 25 Year Anniversary exhibition at Morley College, from the 16th Nov-15th December 2023.