Making with meaning

I trained as a textile designer in the early 2000's and a conceptual starting point was always important. As I've slowly started creating again after quite a creative hiatus - initially under the guise of design (but that's a huge blurry art/design/craft topic for another day) it’s become increasingly apparent that I couldn't ignore my conceptual ideas.

I've always explored these ideas through the use of leather - it's a skin, a tactile, robust material with a story to tell as it ages. The scars it carries of its past life are indicators to us on the outside of what has gone before, the memories that have now been immortalised - and to us, the detached viewer a suggestion of possible events rather than a given.

Echoing these scars I use techniques I've developed and continue to refine from those early 2000 days - I impress my own 'memories' into the leather by placing objects under the skin, cutting, burning and embossing; exploring ideas that quite pleasingly suggest wrinkles, scars, contours and topography of the land and our environment.

This work (which will become a series) suggests a journey, a boundary, a river, the landscape we live in and alongside and how we occupy that space. Each mark is embossed individually into vegetable tanned leather and although each indent is created in the same way using the same process, each mark takes on its own shape, just like us as people.

The same, yet different.