Holly Wong is an artist who lives and works in San Francisco, California. She creates installations, assemblages and works on paper, integrating non-traditional approaches with more traditional sewing and weaving techniques. Whilst her approach is non-conventional, it is, at the same time, deeply rooted in her history and culture, and that of the history of women.

She was educated at the San Francisco Art Institute where she graduated with a Master of Fine Arts with a concentration in New Genres. She has been awarded visual arts grants from the Integrity: Arts and Culture Association, Barbara Deming Memorial fund, the George Sugarman Foundation, the Puffin Foundation, and a Gerbode Foundation purchase award.

Holly has had over 50 group exhibitions and 10 solo exhibitions at venues such as the Berkeley Art Museum, the University of San Francisco and the Evanston Art Center in Illinois. She is a member of SFWA Gallery in San Francisco, and A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, New York.

In this interview, you will learn about Holly’s development from young and uncertain artist to bold and daring professional. She describes her process of emancipation – how being true to her nature and fearlessly following her own instincts allowed her most integrous artwork to truly emerge.

The delicate but haunting imagery in Emily Tull’s portraits expertly depicts the fragility of life. Layers of fine fabric are embroidered over with a worn, frayed effect of sketchy stitching.

Her work “A Conversation with Death” was inspired by Shakespeare’s Hamlet, intertwined with the personal story of the portrait sitter. The subject matter guided her in the select of dark and sumptuous fabrics to layer up the piece.

She is obsessed with faces and how they show the passing of time, keen on showing the fragility of flesh through her thread colour choices and stitching. From her use of fabric layering and stitched mark-making, her work grows into semi-abstract faces with a sense of mystery hidden behind.

Emily Tull won the Visual Arts (Non-Digital) section of the Kent Creative Awards in 2017. She is a co-founder of the Society for Embroidered Work, which promotes contemporary stitch artists. She was a contestant on Sky Arts Portrait Of The Year (2014) and a finalist in the Winter Pride Art Awards (2016). She exhibits across the UK and internationally including at the Mall Galleries (2018), Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (2014) and the Ruth Borchard Self Portrait Prize Exhibition (2015).

Artist Alicja Kozlowska is not only on a mission to bring Pop Art back to today’s art scene. She’s also taking Pop Art to new levels through her use of stitch.

Alicja is a devout fan of Andy Warhol. And she’s dedicated to resurrecting his messages against mass production and levels of consumerism that still exist today. Like Warhol, she uses commercial branding as her subject and elevates the everyday images with which we are bombarded through hand and machine embroidery.

She also takes her work to the masses in quite surprising ways. Don’t miss reading about her ‘performances’ in shopping malls, museums, and even an opera house.

Alicja creates and lives in Poland. She has numerous publications in handicrafts magazines and book illustrations. Her work can currently be seen at the LAM Museum in the Netherlands (where all works relate to food or consumption). She also participated in a collective exhibition in Warsaw this past October called “ART 6.” And she is currently featured in the collective exhibition “Pop Art Award” at the M.A.D.S. gallery in Milan.

How does a music loving textile artist choose between her two obsessions? She doesn’t – she combines them!

That was the no-brainer for Jane Sanders of Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK. Using machine and hand stitch, she creates pictures of iconic musicians on her vintage sewing machine, inspired by her own love of pop culture and the audiences’ love of their musical heroes. She employs techniques such as applique, beading and painting as part of her textile art.

Having been brought up with her mother’s Singer Fashion Mate sewing machine in the 1970s, Jane acquired one herself and has been using it for over 25 years. She sews at her kitchen table which inspired her social media name – stitchin in the kitchen.

Jane started her art training at The Salisbury College of Art and Design, and completed it with a degree in Contemporary Arts Practice from Northumbria University. Her work has been included in many group shows, and she has also had two solo shows in the North East. She has had portraits commissioned all over the world, and they have featured widely in the media.

Photo-Textile Artist Alison King combines delicate and seamless collage and free-machine embroidery with photographs printed on canvas. The finished artwork really builds on the photographic imagery, enhancing it to a higher level of realism through the use of texture and pattern.

Alison King received her Bachelor of Design degree at the Ontario College of Art and Design in 2004, majoring in Material Art & Design. During her studies, she began to photograph everyday things with a new sense of detail, drawn by the textures and colours she encountered. And it was here that she first started to combine pieces of her photographs into her textile works.

Alison’s continued passion for texture attracts her to decomposing buildings with peeling paint and worn woodwork, as well as the rough bark, layered leaves and velvety moss she finds in the local forest landscapes. These subjects inspired her to develop a process for recreating her subjects, where she uses photographs printed on textiles and embellishes using collage, appliqué and machine stitch. Her work has been exhibited throughout Canada and can be found in private collections worldwide.

In this interview we discover how Alison first started integrating photography with textile art for a photo-real effect with added texture, and how she continues to refine this process to achieve a seamless, smooth look to her work. She shares her inspirations for her work and her goal of creating large-scale pieces in the future.