My growing fascination with texture

My fascination with texture came from my creation of nightmarish mixed media works that focus on cosmetic surgery and self criticism. The piece grew from a flat collage of cut magazine clips to a thick layering of disfiguring face cream and blobs of paint. I began to emerge off the canvas. Although this somewhat naive project seems a long time ago now, I look back and see where I came from as an artist. 

  

Now I find myself drawn to fabrics, used and worn. Each piece carrying a story and evoking a memory. I became quite obsessed with preserving these memories by painting the items, revealing dark and light in each garment. In a way I emphasise the life of each item. Or I relate the piece to the body, by hinting at internal organs or orifices.

 I work to invent pasts for the garments too. I personified the baby grow by propping it up and painting it an innocent white. 

 I started sewing old clothes together and creating large and small soft sculptures. I worked with linking old clothes with ‘shells’ of the body, aiming to compare the physical body to the development of the mental state to adulthood- growing up.