Have you ever wanted to create fibre art sculptures but wondered how to shape them into self-supporting objects?

Meet textile artist Meghan Rowswell who creates large organic fibre sculptures, alien and triffid-like, inspired by nature. Achieving a BA in Art History at Hastings College in 2009, Meghan has exhibited in galleries and art spaces across the United States. In 2014, while living in Japan, she achieved the title of Fifth Level Instructor at the Ohara School of Ikebana. Using this knowledge of Japanese flower arranging and design she works predominantly with fabrics, aiming to restore their vitality and substance through arrangement, layering and creating structure, to bring her sculptures to life. Meghan’s eccentric large-scale textile structures look like they have come from another world.

Meghan has completed a residency at Art Farm Nebraska and was an Artist INC Kansas City fellow. Also, she is a member of The PolyArtery Collective, a four-artist group that received the Inspiration Grant from ArtsKC and the Interpretive Grant from Freedom’s Frontier National Heritage Area. The PolyArtery Collective were semi-finalists for the Rocket Grant in 2017 for their immersive art experience, “Weaving the River.” Meghan’s work has been published in two books and in the media and has been featured on the television programme “Mid Missouri Art Talk.” She is the current Blog Content Director for the Military Spouse Fine Artist Network.

In this interview explore Meghan’s exaggerated and fantasy-inspired textile sculptures. She shares how she first got into sewing and embroidery work and quickly became hooked on creating oversized pieces, aiming to get her fibre artwork away from the wall. Discover how her chosen textiles give rise to her designs and how she tackles the challenge of getting her textile shapes into a self-supporting form, making them appear almost as other-worldly beings.

Former science teacher, now exhibited mixed-media artist, Regina Dunn is an inspiration to artists who have yet to find their forte and establish themselves on the art scene.

Starting out with what she admits were decidedly sparse art skills, Regina embarked on a varied series of local art workshops that spurred her on to experiment at home. Only after being encouraged by her husband, did Regina overcome her doubts about herself to take a three-year art cloth course in her native Texas, USA – something that she now gratefully calls her ‘artistic awakening’.

Regina now specialises in fabric-based art, hand-dyeing white fabric and then painting, printing and hand-stitching onto it to express concepts that have deep meanings for her.

She artfully employs symbolism to convey contrast and emotion; an image of a decaying leaf represents both deterioration and also progression towards something more positive. Through her work, Regina expresses how humans relate to change and look to the past, whilst also looking towards the future.

Artist Vanessa Rolf creates striking monochromatic pieces using her intuitive selection of fabric and stitches to explore her favourite subjects; maps, journeys, memorials, inheritance and archives.

Vanessa uses a tactile approach of collecting, sorting and editing to refine her project ideas. This comes about as a result of her fascination with the processes of documenting and labelling to claim and filter objects and experiences. She incorporates a mixture of hand and machine stitch techniques, along with appliqué, printing and dyeing. Hand-stitch is a particular attraction, with its meditative and repetitive action, physically recording the time Vanessa invests in her work. She loves to make full use of the potential that stitching has to instinctively refine texture and design, by adjusting her stitching as she goes along.

Vanessa has recently showed her work in exhibitions including ‘Documentary Discourses’ at the University of the Creative Arts in Farnham, the Embroiderers Guild at Winchester Discovery Centre and ‘Making Common Ground’ in collaboration with Alice Kettle. She is exhibiting in the current 62 Group show ‘CTRL/Shift’ with tour venues including MAC Birmingham, the National Centre for Craft and Design in Sleaford and Scunthorpe Visual Arts Centre.

Alongside her work as an artist, Vanessa is a freelance educator, visiting lecturer and engagement consultant, teaching at Chelsea College of Art and Design, Winchester School of Art and the University of the Creative Arts, Farnham. She is currently Engagement Curator at John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art and a member of the 62 Group of Textile Artists.

Textile artists have long been inspired by nature, but there’s something unique about the levels to which Julia van den Bosch infuses that inspiration into her work. Julia seeks both visceral and emotional responses through stitched relief work that translates the psychological benefits that come from time spent in nature. She strives to communicate the peace, wonder and euphoria nature brings to the psyche, even when viewers aren’t with her on her walks in the countryside.

In this article, you’ll discover Julia’s purposeful, and indeed meditative, approach to capturing nature’s essence and healing powers in her work. You’ll also learn specific techniques she relies upon to help her achieve those goals.

Julia’s works are held in both public and private collections in Europe and the USA. She has also exhibited in galleries across the UK and as part of continuing group shows in the Mall Galleries, Hoxton art gallery and Kingston Museum. In addition to undertaking private commissions, Julia works on site for Richmond on Thames parks department as an ongoing ‘artist in residence.’

Julia van den Bosch: Oriental poppy, 2014, 50cm W x 80cm H, Photography, watercolour painting, overlaid with hand embroidery and appliqué

After hours and hours working on a piece of textile artwork, it is finished at last. You’re tired, but exhilarated. Then you take another look at your work. You don’t like it. You feel frustrated. Others compliment you but you still feel discouraged.

Textile artist and designer Kate Park struggled to like her own work, too. But then she decided to only make art that stemmed from a real passion; her identity and her faith. It fixed the problem. Not only was she delighted with the outcome, but also she loved the process of making art that was important to her.

Kate Park is a textile nerd. She loves weaving, knitting, fabric design, materials technology and everything related to textiles. Her work consists of woven, knitted and felted textile installations and designs.

Layers of wool act like lines of poetry, representing the layers of past and present, her dual identity and aspects of her faith. The artwork she makes incorporates crisp primary colours alongside blocks of white highlights to achieve a bright luminous quality, with the woven threads creating captivating movement.