Looking for something to direct her energy into after her children had left home, Catherine Hicks dug deep into her psyche and realised there was a stifled artist inside just waiting to get out.

Having pushed away the urge to create art for many years, a weekend painting course led to a year of concentrated painting and a need to take her work a step further. She fed her cravings through studying art history and learning about her favourite artists. She began experimenting with paint, dye and woven ribbon strips, piecing together larger works of art.

One day, she started to panic during a class assignment. She had to create a self-portrait with pastels but couldn’t work with them. She made a snap decision to try using pastel-colour thread for the portrait instead. It was a great success and a journey into the world of fibre art beckoned. Now, several years on and Catherine is a professional embroidery artist. Her prize-winning portraits have been shown internationally and throughout the United States.

She freely admits that she is capable of making only three stitches, straight stitch, French knots, and buttonhole. With these three stitches, she gives her portraits a great detail with a lively depth through her expert understanding of light and shadow.

Artist, Pauline Nijenhuis, has an enquiring mind. Not one to stand on the bylines and watch as 21st century production processes – including in textile art – enter an increasingly technological age, she poses some searching questions through her specially designed art projects.

Following the success of her first HAND@WORK project, Pauline has developed her second in the series to ask: what differences do we see in the ‘handwriting’ work of five embroidery artists? And how will the public evaluate the work made by hand in relation to the same work embroidered by a machine? Moreover, do people, in this era of growing digitization and robotization, still appreciate handiwork?

In her first HAND@WORK experiment in 2017 – entitled Fast Work, Time Consuming Landscape – Pauline challenged herself to work increasingly fast to see what effect it had on herself, the artist, and on the resulting artwork. Her project and its conclusions were presented in an installation at the exhibition ‘Time, Space and Architecture’ at Cityscapes Gallery in Amsterdam and also published in a book.

Pauline’s aim is not just to focus on the field of the visual arts, but to see how the ICT revolution affects our lives, our jobs and our prosperity as a whole – and on us as human beings.

When did you first discover the joy of textiles?

When were you first drawn to the colours, the patterns, the possibilities; the excitement of turning material into art?

Perhaps you first picked up a needle years ago, and you loved what you could do with it.

But then life happened, and maybe it’s been a struggle to find the creative momentum to keep on stitching, to keep progressing.

You’ve grabbed a moment to yourself. You’ve got your cuppa and you’re having a sneaky scroll through Facebook or Instagram.

But it’s not the words you’re looking at.

It’s the pictures.

Pictures of faces. Faces of your family and friends.

Drawing on a background in fashion and embroidery Solenne Jolivet’s supremely tactile, geometric and ordered pieces bring focus to the thread. She tries to make the supporting structure disappear and allow the thread to take centre stage, sometimes mixing in paint or dye bringing the interwoven threads even further into the foreground.

After her education in Fashion, Design and Embroidery the fashion industry called. For several years Solenne worked in Italy and France for the companies Taroni, Hermes and Carven. In 2017, she became fuelled by a desire to produce art showcasing the thread, rather than simply being satisfied with using embroidery as a decorative technique. She took the leap and became a freelance Textile Artist and Embroiderer, working on projects with haute couture clients including Louis Vuitton, Dior, Yves Saint Laurent and Schiaparelli, while also developing her own body of work.

Her recent exhibitions in Paris include “Graphic design in Textile Art” at the Fibery Gallery in 2019, the ‘Falls’’ series exhibited at the Gentilly Biennale Festival (Contemporary Art Fair) in 2019 and ‘‘Between embroidery and lace’’ samples exhibited at Interfilière, International Fair of Lingerie in 2018. Solenne also exhibited during ‘‘FashionTech’’, City of Fashion and Design, Paris in 2017.

In this interview, find out how Solenne found that in the fashion industry drawing precedes embroidery and is fundamental in guiding decorative stitch work. Discover how, as a textile artist, she has been able to explore how drawing and embroidery can build on each other, and how to use light and colour as essential components of her work. Solenne also shares her love of research and sampling as a way to define her own style.