Page 29 - The Digital Cloth - Issue 5

Sian Fenwick is a mixed media paper and fabric artist working from
her home studio in the UK.
’I am inspired by vintage suitcases overflowing with memories,
keepsakes and heirlooms. Sewing boxes filled to the brim with old
haberdashery treasures, family albums of sepia photographs and a
nostalgic childhood of nursey rhymes and story books’

Sian like most children had a box of found treasures: a shiny button, a
heart shaped stone, a piece of broken jewellery, a ticket or a favourite
birthday card which she still has today along with her childhood books
and the memories that they hold. This interest in the way that small
fragments of an item, colour or image can evoke nostalgic memories
inspires her to visits vintage fairs, junk shops and lately the French
Brocante to collect her ‘treasures’ and imagine their secret past
Once gathered Sian stitches, paints, stamps, collages and distresses,
creating layered mixed media snippets using these fragments and
nostalgic ephemera. She enjoys the process of stitching into paper
particularly liking the way the needle marks, creases, and crinkles are
left behind when the paper takes on a worn fabric like quality.

Sian hand stitches in a very impatient spontaneous and instinctive
way, mistakes are incorporated into the designs. Machine stitches
become scribble. Wonky edges, wavy lines and rogue stitches have
become her tagline. She asks you not to tell her mum, the textile
teacher and queen of straight lines, perfect seams and tidy backs!
These little snippets that are created often with birds, butterflies or
animals suggest that they were once a piece of something larger, part
of a bigger story and in time like memories they have faded and only
a beautiful torn treasured little piece is left. These snippets are used
to decorate her artist cards, notebook covers, used as multiples in
bigger pieces or sold in little box frames.

Sian has recently enjoyed stitching on maps, reminding her of
holidays spent in the family car with ridiculously big maps being
unfolded, impossible to read and never to fold up ever again. Now the
maps have been taken over by technology she finds they are quite
easy to source in junk shops. The maps she finds are fascinating in
the patterns they create, the marks they make and the many different
colours they come in. The map colour palettes have been relevant in
Sian’s Summer Meadow workshops where the sea expertly becomes
the sky as a background against which all the meadow grasses and
flowers are painted, collaged then machine or hand stitched.

Being commissioned to create pet portraits in her style can be a worry
in getting it right with the regard to the way Sian likes to work. This
Mixed Media Artist memorial portrait of Lulu was created with a collage of

Japanese Chiyogami papers and napkins. One of her favourite things

siAn fenwick in a commissioned artwork is to source the right piece of vintage
paper. In this case it was the joy of finding a vintage piece of sheet
music entitled ‘Don’t Bring Lulu’. The piece was then hand stitched,
with her favourite straight stitch in its many forms and is found