Growing up in North Yorkshire, I spent ten years by the coast, looking for shells and fossils on the beach and walking in the woods. After that, I lived on a farm on the edge of the moors for 12 years, hunting for northern eggar caterpillars and empress moths, and building pretend nests and lining them with the fluffy bits from willow herb, while Mum picked blackberries. This beautiful area with its unique environment and flora and fauna has been a big influence on me and has stayed vivid through all the stages of my creative career.
Art was always there as a possible direction to go in; my mum was an artist, and my eldest sister is a potter. I did an art foundation course and went on to study for a degree in textiles. The course was very hands-on and covered every aspect of the craft, from printing and weaving to spinning. I loved experimenting with the sculptural things that fabrics can do, and I specialized in pleating. I moved to London in 1984 and set up a studio where I made scarves for Liberty. But it was when I showed my fabrics to the iconic designer Jean Muir and she commissioned some fascinators, that I was catapulted into the world of fashion. I formed a business partnership with friend Anne Tomlin and for the next 20 years, we made hats for the likes of Liberty, Harvey Nichols and Saks Fifth Avenue. It was a time of big orders, and I learnt a lot from making large quantities of the same thing. One year a company ordered a thousand lilies made with a millinery technique for rolling edges. I made them in my sleep, in the pub, watching TV—I must have done that 10,000 hours thing that means you’ve really learned something. That sort of work leads to a particular level of making-fitness that’s still of great value in the very different ways I work today. It developed my understanding of the importance of practicing as a way of refining my work.
I loved that hat-making time, but there was always an artist lurking in the background. One commission, for the Mad for Tea exhibition at Fortnum and Mason in 2015, was key to helping that to happen. My brief was to make a tea cosy in the style of my millinery. Swirls of steam and bees came out of a camellia flower, using all the materials and delicacy of hat-making, but this time to make a sculpture. It was the forerunner of the way I work now.
Textiles and millinery are wonderful languages for expressing creative ideas. Nature is full of fibers and textures, from richly colored butterfly wings to tufts of grass. I feel closer to these natural things by using threads and fabrics to describe them. And millinery is all about a light touch too, with tiny stitches and elegant lines making a piece look ethereal and effortless. That helps with making a hint of a bird, a suggestion of a butterfly, or wispy grasses blowing in the wind.
I was recently invited to be one of nine artists taking part in the Birds on the Edge exhibition at Inspired by… Gallery, in the north of England where I grew up. It was part of a conservation project led by the North York Moors Trust in collaboration with North York Moors National Park Authority.
It was wonderful to have this opportunity to make nature-inspired work that combines conservation with artistic inspiration. It took me full circle from my childhood to bringing all the ideas and ways of making from my creative career back to this place where my fascination in nature began.
We went on a study day to do research for our artworks with bird experts and North York Moors ecologists. The chilly April day made me feel the challenges birds face as we walked through wind, rain and snow, all in a couple of hours. We talked about how The North has many more insects, and long daylight hours in summer, so chicks grow and fledge faster than they would nearer the equator. Turtle doves come here from Spain, some adventurous robins go to Sweden for the summer… The massive effort of migration is mostly worth it.
We visited conservation sites made especially for turtle doves. They’re very shy and particular about food and environment; when they drink, they like a gravelly beach to walk down, and they only eat seeds from meadow plants. The conservation is all about making the right habitat in good faith that the birds will come. It’s time-consuming work, not many birds are visible, and nests are mostly hidden away. That inspired me to make work for the exhibition that brings some of those hidden aspects of birdlife into view.
Birds are a wonderful inspiration for ingenious making and sustainability, using the materials in their habitat—from stems of last year’s flowers to cat fluff, or wood shavings— and their nests are samples of the human activities and flora and fauna of a particular place.
Inspired by this, I made Nestscape, a nest made from materials commonly found in a milliner’s natural habitat: dyed abaca fiber, millinery straw, wire, organza, velvet. All the dyed colors and flowers represent the change of the seasons and the flora and fauna of the landscape—what a nest might look like if it started to grow again.
I’ve been so inspired by this creative return to North York Moors National Park and the conservation work achieved through this project—it brought back my childhood experiences growing up there with all its vivid memories of nature. But it also made me realize just how lucky I am to have had that experience so early in my life. One of the moving aspects of the Birds on the Edge project has been the way North York Moors Trust and their partners have connected young people with the project, giving many of them their first experience of connecting with nature. Working with them has inspired me to add educational outreach aspects to my projects that can connect both young and old with the understanding and appreciation of nature that making can bring.
My way of making brings me closer to nature and nature takes me closer to the materials I use. A feather found out walking reminds me of where it came from when I snip it to suggest a delicate grass head.
The tapered strands of feathers become a way to represent the whiskery fronds of grasses and cutting the rhythms of corn and barley gives me a language to describe their beauty and give them the respect and admiration they deserve.
I collect feathers from many of the bird colonies in the parks in London. I know where the crows congregate on Peckham Rye and I’ve used them for monochrome suggestions of reeds at twilight, and the feathers of Canada geese are always blowing around Burgess Park. However, I think my favorites are the parakeet feathers in Ruskin Park which I pass through every day on my way to the studio. They suggest grass in all its shades of green and have a wonderful iridescence when the light catches them.
In the past there’s been a tradition of rare exotic feathers in millinery that is very out of touch with the ethical, sustainable culture that I care about. I’m working on promoting a new sort of value for feathers sourced in ethical and sustainable ways that’s based on finding them and celebrating their seasonal nature. I have two pet bantams, and they keep me down to earth with the yearly cycles birds have of molting, and in touch with the changes of season that make this happen.
I want to share my love of making and the way my work grows from the creative compost of
my life as a maker—and my observations as a gardener. I hope to transport the viewer to a place where species and techniques combine and cross-pollinate, to show the fascinating parallels between making and the way nature evolves. And I want to encourage respect and understanding of materials and making as a new language to communicate on cultural and environmental issues.
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From Isabelle Fish | Few artists are able to materialize the invisible as well as Bridget Bailey. Through her art, we “see” the path of the bee gathering pollen, the swoop of the swallow, the buzzing of the fly. We are drawn into and are absorbed by all the minute details, forced to slow down, invited to center ourselves to be transported in that meadow so close to Bridget’s heart. It’s a transformative experience.
