Cas Holmes is world-renown for her ability to combine the worlds of stitch and painting to create incredible textile landscapes. So when she published her book Textile Landscape: Painting with Cloth in Mixed Media last October, it’s no surprise it was met with great excitement. Textile artists were eager to gain an inside look into her creative process and “stitch-sketching” techniques.

The book is packed with instruction, inspiration and gorgeous imagery. It starts with basic instruction on techniques related to colouring and mark-making on fabric and paper. It then provides a myriad of examples and projects to help readers imagine all the possibilities for creating textile landscapes of their own.

This article features an interview with Cas in which she explains what inspired the book’s creation, as well as some of her favourite techniques featured in the book.

Cas grew up in Norfolk and now lives in Kent. Her work has appeared in both solo and group exhibitions across the globe. She regularly works on collaborations and community projects including a commission with the Garden Museum (London) and a project with a homeless charity in the Medway area. She was also an artist-in-residence at West Dean College where she regularly teaches.

Willemien de Villiers is a South African artist and member of the 62 Group. Her long career spans sculpture, painting and stitching. In her work, she often explores the themes of connectedness through nature as well as gender inequality, misogyny and patriarchy.

In her stitched work, Willemien creates detailed, intricate and interlinked pieces based on her feelings of our deep interconnection to the world at a cellular level. Creating through a slow, meditative practice to mimic the passing of time in nature, she chooses to work on pre-used fabrics with obvious signs of wear. Her attention to the reverse side of her work enhances the feeling of interconnection by raising the importance of what is hidden behind the surface.

She is intrigued by the patterns found in biological cells and uses repeat patterns, integrating them with existing marks and stains on old fabrics. In her latest works, she expresses strong feminist statements about the power dynamics in a marriage.

In this article, Willemien shares how she developed her recent Subversive Bride series based on the concept of a trousseau. These works are abstract representations of a bride’s trousseau dreams and hopes. She sews onto used tablecloths and other domestic fabrics, incorporating their stains to explore patriarchy and the restrictions on women that still exists in most cultures.

An avid collector of vintage printed fabrics and found embroideries for over 20 years, New York fibre artist Orly Cogan uses hand embroidery to modernize their appearance, altering their original purpose and revolutionizing the story of the women who created them. Seeing herself as a collaborator with these female makers from more modest eras, Orly uses stitch to incorporate into their work the unladylike reality and wit that she sees as more common to the women of today.

Aware of modern stereotypes which, she believes, must be overcome, Orly highlights the differences between the struggles contemporary women face and those of the earlier generation who would have originally embroidered the textiles to “feminize” their homes.

Orly is drawn to the space between – dichotomies such as soft and tough, dirty and clean, fantasy and reality, especially as related to gender. She explores common feminine archetypes and stereotypes, such as Madonna/Whore, Pin-Up Girl, Lolita, and the Femme Fatale and she mixes subversion with flirtation, humour with power, and intimacy with frivolity.

She considers that the fabric becomes the foundation for a fantastical exploration.

With an innate sense of political rights and wrongs and a deep empathy for humanity, Julie Peppito creates sculptures, collages, drawings, quilts and tapestries to depict a narrative, an idea or make social or political comments.

Julie seamlessly integrates plastic litter, objects from nature and collected items along with drawn and painted imagery into her works. She arranges and rearranges her composition until she is happy, then sews it together, adding stitched, repetitive patterns and paint to finish her work. The collaged, conjoined nature of her work is symbolic of our interconnections to each other and to our planet.

After a huge knock to her confidence at college, when her work was derided by people lacking an understanding of the concept of textile art, she gained strength from her professor’s positive response. She began to assert herself, moved to a more supportive environment and has gone on develop an important body of work during her career.

Julie received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1992 and a Master of Fine Arts in 2004. In 2001, she received a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship for sculpture. She has produced seven one-woman shows and shown her work in many other joint exhibitions.

For the last twenty years, Imelda Connolly harboured a secret dream. The dream of becoming an artist. But with no formal training, she fuelled her passion by creating small textile collages in private, never finding the courage to share what she made.

She would while away hours in fabric shops seeking out unusual textured and patterned fabrics.

But she became increasingly frustrated by the limitations of relying purely on the materials themselves to create interest and lacked confidence in her own abilities; she longed to have the skill to make her own designs with stitch.

With no access to suitable in-person courses in her area, Imelda began to search for guidance online.But the courses she found were expensive and required lengthy commitments.