Stacey Chapman: Lifelike portraits with recycled fabric scraps

Following her urge to create realistic portraits, Stacey Chapman creates images of people and animals using freehand machine embroidery and collage.

Along with a running theme of portraits and fashion, she likes to collect and include found scraps of materials, each of which hold their own piece of history.

After gaining a degree in Illustration Stacey Chapman worked as an interior designer for events and corporate launches. She left this job following illness and began experimenting with freehand machine embroidery after seeing Kirstie Allsop’s Handmade Britain programme on the television.

Stacey realised she could combine this technique with her passion for portrait drawing to produce detailed thread paintings. She started by producing commissioned pet portraits and has evolved her techniques and inspirations from there.