Using the sewing machine as a tool for continuous line drawing, Julie’s work explores movement and texture with often unpredictable outcomes, which have been likened to ink illustration.

Her work focuses on the wild side of nature, dance and motion. Each piece is unique and one off. The speed and capricious nature of the sewing machine, when used in this unconventional way reflect characteristics of the subjects.

Using reclaimed fabric, paper and handmade felt open new opportunities to discover how the stitched marks respond to different surfaces, pulling or embossing a piece of work in sympathy with the surface. Threads are purposely left loose over or around the image to allow the illusion of more depth and movement.

In this interview, Julie explains how reclaimed fabric, thread and her trusty Bernina all combine to produce her remarkable designs. We learn why travel was an instrumental pathway to her becoming an artist and how Julie finds inspiration from her students and Alfred’s racing pigeons.

Richard McVetis’ artistic practice centres on his training as an embroiderer through the use of traditional hand stitch techniques and mark making.

Using laboured and meticulously worked wools and multiples of embroidered dots and crosses, he explores the similarities between pen on paper and thread on fabric, using a limited vocabulary of mark making and deliberately subdued colour to create a binary simplicity.

Richard is a member of the renowned 62 Group of Textile Artists. He was a finalist for the Jerwood Drawing Prize 2016 and was selected for Real to Reel: Craft Film Festival during London Craft Week 2017.

In this article, part of our From conception to creation series, Richard speaks to us about the inspiration for and making process of his beguiling piece Variations of a Stitched Cube, which has been selected to be part of the British Council’s Pavilion at the Cheongju Craft Biennale, South Korea.

Gary Dickins was born in London in 1962 and moved to Somerset in 1972.

In 2004, Gary started working from a shared studio space in the Blackdown Hills in East Devon. In 2010 he constructed a purpose built studio in his garden, he now works at his home in Somerset.

As a self-taught artist, Gary has developed a unique style of contemporary painting from the use of found materials. Handmade paper, canvas, earth, fungi, stitching, paint, textiles, rusting metal, anything. These are combined to create a body of dramatic, powerful and continually evolving work.

In this interview, Gary reveals his journey to becoming an artist and we discover how a combination of very personal everyday challenges and global wars influence his series of work.

Cas Holmes is one of the UK’s best-known textile artists with works in public and private collections. The world of travel has been a constant throughout Cas’ adult life to work and study, researching in Japan, India and Canada.

As she points out in her book Stitch Stories, Batsford, 2015, that

travel takes place in the mind as much as across land or even continents.

As she travels, she collects, often cast-off textiles, or gifts of the old and the worn, mostly gifted from friends. These are painted, layered, collaged and stitched to capture fleeting moments in time respond to her environment, her experiences and the interaction between the urban, the human and the land.

Randy Walker originally studied Architecture at the University of Oregon and as an artist has completed temporary and permanent commissions all across the United States of America.

The recipient of many grants and awards Randy’s work straddles precariously on several boundaries: solidity and transparency; structural stability and collapse; visibility and invisibility.

He strives to create work that primarily engages our sense of sight by contemplating how light can define structure, surface, and colour.

In this interview, we discover what fires Randy’s imagination and how his background in architecture has shaped his artistic vocabulary. We learn about his commissioned work and how he puts together his subtle yet mind blowing installations.