Page 24 - The Digital Cloth Holiday issue 2

I look out my window, across our I really like to work directly
paddocks to the water and from the reference of a live
mountains beyond… I pinch myself plant. I pull it apart and
and think how blessed I am to live unfold petals so I can get a
in such a beautiful environment that feel for the shape and how
gives me the endless desire to the plant is put together.
create. I live in a small coastal Deconstructing them to their

village in South Gippsland, most basic forms in this way
Victoria. Having lived here for just is the start of my process
over a year now, this place gives me before deciding what fabrics
such a sense of calm and belonging and threads I will use and
that I have not felt living anywhere what techniques I will apply.
else before. Sometimes I can think about

Every glance, no matter how fleeting, a piece for quite a while
grants me limitless sources of deciding what is the best way
inspiration for my art practice. to replicate it in textiles, but

most of the time the plant
My morning routine is to take my
little pug “Willow” for a walk to the
beach. On the way I check out what
is blooming in everyone’s garden,
usually colour is what catches my
eye first, then the shape and form
will take my interest. Many plants
relate well to textiles and my art
work is a way of capturing the plant
at the height of its beauty and

preserving it forever. My neighbours
are all very understanding of me
pinching a sprig or two from their
gardens. The beach where we live
is very organic and rugged, with
eroded cliff faces, rocks, planes of
scrubs, wild flowers and T-trees. On
the border of our next door
neighbours property is a grave yard

of twisted wood that has been
battered by the ocean in high tide.
These make wonderful bases for my
arrangements and anchors my art
practice to my environment. By the
time I am old and grey, I hope that
my eternal foraging for references
finds myself just as much a fixed
part of this landscape as the other
scenes that I have come to adore.