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. 

My university studies included geography, geomorphology, ancient history and a Diploma of Education, and I began a career of teaching english and social studies to highschoolers. However, that brilliant career was short lived, as I married an exploration geologist whose profession took us to several key Australian Outback mining centres, the USA and eventually Uruguay, South America. In the process I've travelled through and lived in quite a number of different landscapes, some of them quite remote, and each has impacted and shaped my artistic vision to some degree. 

I was initally inspired to embroider my own ideas while living in the booming mining town of Kalgoorlie-Boulder in the Eastern Goldfields of Western Australia. That harsh semi-desert region is dramatically different from the leafy green mountainous 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. Over time, my landscape inspired designs have became increasingly abstract, as a road crossing a landscape became the symbol of my journey through Life.

Beside the childhood influences inspiring me to stitch, the time I spent in the USA, 1987-1994 was also formative as I learned about traditional patchwork and quilting, began making art quilts and developed an enduring love of grid layouts. Grids symbolise the instinctive human desire for stability, order and peace.  My most recent works feature increasingly distorted grids reflecting the chaos in today's world as people move away from political and economic changes caused by war, climate change and natural disasters.