Patterns of the Shore
A unique collaboration combining elements of naturalism, history and the written word.
Night and Day (coal beach), 2023 | Wool, cotton, silk & crayon on paper
This project is a collaboration with Kirsty Fox (lyric essayist) and Kathryn Cooper (artist and community gardener). The three of us decided to visit Gibraltar Point Nature Reserve, with each producing our own creative response to the site.
Back home, I was inspired to combine colours from our trip with patterns from The Mitten Book by Gottfridsson & Gottfridsson (Lark Books, 1987). A herd of Hebridean sheep are used at Gibraltar Point to manage the sand dunes, eating weeds that would otherwise smother wildflowers and lichens.
The book describes the ways in which colours for woollen mittens were traditionally used with strong ties to nature —
“Ivy, rose bushes, rose wreaths, forget-me-nots, and lingon branches wind around the hand and thumb of the mitten.”
“The colours, too, are copied from Gotland’s natural environment. Brown and black for the background suggest stonemoss, walnut and oak bark. The bright colours in the patterns represent the island’s beautiful wildflowers.”
The textile works in this series were designed iteratively, combining threads of wool, cotton and silk to evoke texture. Each sits alongside its corresponding photograph from the day.
Detail of Coal Beach
Rosepole (brant), 2023 | Wool, cotton, silk & crayon on paper
Detail of brant
Detail of Rosepole
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