I'm an Australian textile artist living in Montevideo, Uruguay. 

 

I've always found fabric+stitch a satisfying way to express my creativity, and my comfort with the medium results from years of watching various female family members who stitched embroideries and sewed clothes for me and my sisters.  I've always loved what hands, needle, thread and fabric working together can produce.

I was initally inspired to embroider my own ideas when I was living in the booming mining town of Kalgoorlie-Boulder in the Eastern Goldfields of Western Australia, an environment dramatically different from the conservative leafy green state of Tasmania in which I grew up, and I'm sure stitching was one of the ways I coped with that huge change.  Crewel-style stitching of landscape elements featured the lines, shapes, colours and textures of that distinct flat, semi-desert landscape dramatically marked by decades of mining activity. As my designs became more abstract, a road crossing a landscape became the symbol of my journey through Life.

In that journey I spent a few years in the USA, and while learning about traditional geometric patchwork there, I developed a love of grid layouts.  Grids symbolise the instinctive human desire for stability, order and peace.  My dismay at the increasing chaos in today's world of famine, war, displaced people, and international relations generally, is reflected in the distorted grid layouts of my most recent designs.