Unlike a lot of embroidery artists, I don’t have a long history with embroidery or any lovely story about being taught by my grandmother. Embroidery came to me at a very difficult time in my life. I was experiencing some quite severe mental health problems and started experimenting with stitching (mostly as a distraction), and my style sort of appeared out of nowhere in that time. However, I have always been creative in some way. I was a semiprofessional photographer for a number of years and I’ve loved experimenting with new creative outlets since I was young. It’s definitely all connected.
Embroidery is important to me, and I joke about this a lot, but it is absolutely true — it saved my life. It gave me an outlet when things were really tough. I was able to not only turn it into a self-sustaining career for myself but also a daily meditative practise which has been invaluable to my mental health over the past few years.
I like to think that it chose me, in the sense that I didn’t set out to start — just some cosmic kismet with a friend gifting me threads at a time when I wouldn’t have been able to afford to buy supplies to start experimenting. More than anything, I make my work for myself. It’s a physical representation of working toward something purely for myself.
I am predominantly inspired by the landscapes around me at any given time. Over the past six years, I have been incredibly privileged to spend a lot of time by the sea in Anglesey (which has informed the largest collections of my work), along with two extended summers spent in Switzerland exploring the textures in the Alps. When the pandemic hit, like most people, I had to reevaluate my source materials and start looking closer to home for inspiration, which has informed a lot of my more recent work looking at man-made textures in man-made urban spaces.
Completing a piece can vary, depending on the project and size (all of which are done from my small home studio space), but usually consists of me picking out a few key colours I know I’m likely to include in the work, and then building on that as I go. I don’t usually have a strict method I follow because I’m usually bound by how many hours a week I can stitch, now that I have a toddler and a dog running around the house.
I’m a sucker for saying that every hoop that I create is my favourite one, but I think the hoop that made the cover of my book, Abstract Embroidery, may finally be the first piece I keep for myself after six years of sending them around the world. The piece itself felt like a full-circle moment. Taken from a texture found in Anglesey on a favourite beach of mine, it was then stitched and photographed at a new favourite beach near my new home in Canada. That hoop in particular feels special.
Salt Stitches was never really started as a business: The Instagram account was created just so I had a visual diary of the work that I was producing so that I could see it in one place. I had no experience with starting or running my own business, so there have been a lot of lessons learned! My mum was the person who actually negotiated my first sale. I had named a piece Irish Moss — and a friend of hers had said it reminded her of her family home in Ireland by the sea. The rest is history, I guess.
It’s mostly been challenging balancing the self-employment life, in the sense that you are solely responsible for your income. There have been times when I haven’t sold pieces for extended periods, which have felt a little bit stressful. In the face of this, I have had to spend time thinking about different ways to offer products to people away from just the embroidery pieces. Selling prints and selling my own fabric packs during the pandemic was a real lifeline, but takes a lot of work — and it’s not my area of expertise!
Social media has changed a lot in the last four years, especially after the pandemic, and it is definitely getting harder for creators to have their work seen by the number of people they used to. Despite this, the internet is still a wonderful place. I’ve been fortunate enough to meet an incredible community of people and supporters from all over the world, which never really sinks in. A personal highlight was being able to make a special hoop for Amanda Seyfried, which went on to be featured on her Architectural Digest apartment tour — a very surreal moment for me!
Writing Abstract Embroidery was another completely surreal experience. Initially, my imposter syndrome kicked in and I actually turned down the opportunity a couple of times before saying yes. I wasn’t sure anyone would be interested in what I had to say about embroidery because I haven’t come from a traditional craft background, but I am so glad that I said yes in the end. The process was simple and hard in equal measures: It forced me to really look at a lot of my work through the eyes of the people who would be buying the book, and I really tried to explain my processes a lot more in depth than I had before. Being able to hold a physical copy of the book in my hands hasn’t really sunk in yet, and I don’t imagine it will anytime soon.
Urban 4 Project
The texture that inspired this project was found in the Blavatnik Building at the Tate Modern in London. Formerly the Bankside Power Station (which opened in 1891), it sat vacant and degrading from 1981 until it reopened in 2000.
Not long after it reopened, the “cellars” were renovated to use as additional gallery space, but the interior concrete walls were largely untouched. Therefore, the walls are covered with years of pen marks, levelling indicators from the original concrete pouring, chalk numbers and paste from old notices.
You will need:
- 15.25cm (6 in) embroidery hoop
- Printed fabric of your choice
- A selection of embroidery threads, needles and scissors
- A mixture of small beads, as well as larger ones for adding details
INSPIRATION
I wanted to capture the essence of a space without there being any identifying features of where the place could be.
I wasn’t as focused on keeping the colour palette true to real life. I wanted a way to honour places that have been important to me during my artistic development, putting my own spin on areas of the gallery that are often overlooked.
Before I printed the image onto cotton poplin, I dramatically increased the brightness (because it is a very dimly lit gallery space) and boosted the saturation quite a bit so that I could highlight the brightest colours hidden within the texture.
COLOUR
Even after increasing the saturation, I felt that the colours were still a little less bright than I wanted. I intentionally picked thread colours that were a few shades brighter or more vibrant to add even more contrast to the background texture. I think the best examples are the very neon pinks I’ve used across the centre of the hoop, which form a striking contrast to some of the more pastel blue and purple tones around the edges.
Although this is one of my favourite textures from one of my favourite locations, I found this particular texture quite flat when it came to working with smaller areas of detail (that I would usually highlight with small delicate areas of beading or larger semi-precious stone beads). Because of this, I intentionally chose beads that were a little more opulent, such as the lavender freshwater pearl at the top of the hoop, the clear Swarovski crystal to the right, and the spotted white jasper in the middle.
The same applied to the beaded sections — I purposefully chose the brightest pinks and purples from my collection to really make those areas stand out.
Even though I focused on making some of the pinks as vibrant as possible for this piece (because, why not?), the real fun for me was the subtle delicacy of the very pale shades of light blue, mint and white. One of the benefits of the large selection of threads I have amassed is that there is a lot of room to include colours that are very similar to each other, but different enough that you can see the subtle colour changes between sections. I especially love the area to the top left of the hoop where the three shades of very pale aqua/blue/green threads work in such harmony together.
TIP: When it comes to finding similar areas of texture for you to explore, I would start with buildings that have stood for a long time but maybe have been repurposed over the years — bars that used to be town halls, hotels that used to be commerce buildings — and anywhere that had a life before its current use. You never know what details have been left behind in a basement, and they’re usually the best ones!
This past year has been one of my most successful professionally with the release of my book and winning the 100 Kellogg Lane Art Comp, but both have come at a price for the creative side of my career. I’m hoping to focus the next little while on creating more large-scale pieces (as that’s where I am happiest!) and exploring new and interesting avenues for my work. I am always open to collaborations of different kinds and I’m hoping that this year I get to explore some ideas I’ve had for a while and see how they turn out.
I would also love an opportunity in the future to explore in-person workshops again, which dropped off during and post-pandemic, because I do miss the interaction with people and the sense of community I get from hosting workshops around the world.
