My Work is primarily concerned with the textiles process. I am patricularly interested in the link between grief and textiles and exploring the process of weaving as a method of exploring the self, the mind.

Process is key in my practice, and I have been working to bring the artistic process to the forefront, removing my work from the confines of a static finished piece on the wall. I really wanted to animate and to highlight the human experience that informs the artwork, particularly with regards to a practice as involved and laborious as weaving. Film has recently become a vital part

of the work, originally using photography and cyanotypes, film has now taken over. I have felt a tangible shift from how stuck I felt before with the constraints of the still image, to how much I am able to portray through film and audio pieces extracted from my own writing.

The recent loss of my Dad is on my mind throughout. I have shifted from seeing my grief as something that hindered my creative process to now placing it right at the centre. The process of making has allowed me to ponder over my own emotions in a way nothing else, other than listening to and playing music can. Striving for perfectionism is a personal trait I have been attempting to unravel, forcing myself away from the need to create factory perfect cloth, away from recording hundreds of takes of readings from my notebook, away from stopping the recording when there is a glitch in my guitar playing, because the essence of my work now is trying to capture the many flawed facets of human life proudly into the woven material, after all ‘to err is human’.

There are numerous literary references to the loom as an extension of the operator, the body moving as the loom does, and I believe this extends to the mind too. Does the machine become more human or does the operator become more machine? I think the two somehow meet and meld together and the result is memory stained cloth that mirrors the human cycle of life and death. Weaving each piece brings it into being and cutting it off the loom ends that cycle, with the time spent making it held within the (not always visible) flaws and character of the fabric. Every repetition of that process conceives and then ceases each different but seemingly identical piece of tactile cloth.

I am fascinated by the obsessive quality of weaving and want to portray the passage of time in such a process. Time and intention are major themes in my work. The films that I make aim to slow the viewing process right down, and the surfaces that these films are projected on to, being handmade, means that the viewer is then able to appreciate the time going into making handmade fabric, something that is often taken for granted. The cloth in question is also plain, blank, white – the aim being to make the film the ‘weft’ pattern – the ghost of the making process projected onto an invisibly grief soaked ‘sheet’ or even ‘shroud’.