Dripping In It #1 Painting

I create vibrant and tactile, abstract paintings that marry together highly detailed embroidery with fine art painting techniques. Strong and free, unique and spontaneous, elegant and anarchic, this is the message I hope to convey in my work. Playful, organic forms, harmonious yet bold colours, are stitched into with dynamic embroidery compositions, that are stripped back to just a pure line, stroke, splatter or scribble - the basic, fundamental acts of mark making; spontaneous and intuitive. Recreated in stitch they become considered and premeditated. I’m inspired by everyday life stuff; Snippets of conversations, lyrics from songs, memories of people and places I’ve been. They all reflect notions of impulse, chance, spontaneity and emotion; I aim to document or capture a fleeting glimpse of these through paint and embroidery; a continuous thread running through my work is to live in the moment. My contemporary painting style draws loose inspiration from the drama and light of Impressionism and Romanticism, to the decorative curves, scrolls, colours and sensuality of Rococo Art, combined with elements of graffiti and notions of erosion and vandalism. The impetus for my embroidery is fuelled by my love of texture and stitch, I simply don’t feel a painting is real or complete until it’s got some sort of stitch in it!. The embroidery’s playful, darker side touches upon the historical and political landscape of textile art, its status and place in fine art and the stereotypes that surround it. Hence my embroidery is always ‘on top’, elevating its status as the dominant medium in my paintings. I prefer to create each painting from memory, enabling me to produce images that are more abstracted and expressional interpretations of my memories. Each piece evolves through a highly contrasting, two-stage process; the first is with an intuitive, energetic and spontaneous approach to paint my ‘memory-scapes’. I throw, scrape, scratch, wipe, roller, spray and splatter paint onto canvas. Very rarely do I pick up a brush! I paint with oils, acrylics , spray paint and pastels. The second stage is followed by a more controlled approach, with many labour intensive hours of carefully planned embroidery; a free-style machine embroidery technique where I use a sewing machine to ‘draw with stitches’ directly into the painted canvas.