Page 53 - The Digital Cloth - holiday issue 5

Textile Wildlife Artist, Embroidery me that I wanted to capture what
Realism, Creating Change with Thread nature has gifted us with, to hold
and Animal Activist. on to it, to make it last and to show
When people ask me how I started out it to the world in the medium of
to become a textile artist, my answer thread.
always is: I didn’t.
I bought my sewing machine seven For the past three years, I worked
years ago and all I wanted was to make very hard to translate photos into
clothes for my kids and the occasional thread, striving for realism in my
pouch for myself. I had no intention embroidery. I needed to learn about
of making it my profession nor could colour composition, highlights and
I have ever imagined that I would be shadows, bone structure and
raising funds for endangered species most of all, I needed to work on my
and wildlife conservation. patience! Realism demands time,
dedication and the love for detail.
Getting bored with trying to sew in a Those were all features I didn’t
straight line and unpicking thread, I possess, but acquired slowly with
started to experiment with my sew- every portrait I finished. With my
ing machine and began to doodle with skills, the size of the portraits grew
thread. My main inspirations back then as well, and projects that took a few
were Poppy Treffry and Alisa Burke weeks expanded into four month
who were sewing out of the box and I working blocks. None of which I
really dig their style. Over time I would have been able to imagine
managed to find my own style and the myself doing at the very beginning.
needle turned into my brush, thread So, art really stretched me on so
into my paint and through several many levels!
trial and error moments, I taught
myself how to thread paint. Now I
never was much of a painter, in fact I
was convinced that I couldn’t draw at
all but my sewing machine proved me
wrong and so my career as a textile
artist began.

Animals have always played a role in
my life, so it wasn’t hard to find my
field of subjects. As I began to study
my reference photos for my sewing
adventures, I began noticing all the
small details there were in a leopard’s
nose for example, an owl’s ear or an
ape’s skin. The patterns, the fur
structure, the colours, the highlights,
the textures – a completely new world
opened up to me and revealed its
natural beauty to me. My inspiration
went into overload and from that
moment on it became quite apparent to