Twenty One Trees
An exhibition of new textile work at Art and Vintage, Lyne Street, Edinburgh
24th of April – 24th of June 2018
Twenty One Trees: Artist Statement
I sew trees. I’ve always loved them. In recent years, the trees I sew have become less illustrative and more abstract – I find I’m creating rhythms, with a melody of leaves. I’m looking for silences in the music too: those empty spaces are often as important as the music of the trees. At the same time I see them as fences, or boundaries, prison bars even – a metaphor for the restrictions all artists have to impose upon themselves in order to find some sense in the chaos of infinite possibilities.
Mondrian’s geometric abstractions originated in his studies of trees and, although I will never create pieces as stripped down, I am exploring a similar territory, where the making of the work becomes the work itself, and the initial source of my inspiration – forests, woods and trees – become distilled to forms that stand alone as images, floating free of their roots.
All of this is done on a Bernina sewing machine using free motion embroidery – the needle and thread become a pencil or a paintbrush. I draw guidelines and then see where the needle takes me in the intricate patterns of bark, leaf and branch.