Identity in Textile Art

In May my solo exhibition Identity shows at Bottleworks in Newcastle. The exhibition explores the themes of identity and personality through emboidery and textiles.

Stitch is the act of piecing things together; and through it, I piece together thoughts on identity and personality. The exhibition asks why we change our personality in different situations, and whether this is always for justifiable reasons. Just as the artworks are stitched together, the viewer pieces together their thoughts on these pertinent questions. Viewing the layers of fabric, we are reminded of the layers of the self, and must question whether our true self is ever truly revealed.

I've found this a really interesting theme to research and then ultimately create an exhibition about. There comes a time with certain bodies of work where you have to say to yourself there is a deadline and the work needs to be done - no matter how much more you want to create for it! I know that more work exploring this theme will be created in the not too distant future and further exhibitions will be held.

For this blog post I thought it would be interesting to share how the main focal exhibition piece has developed - I won't be sharing photos of the completed work as I feel it important to save that for the opening of the exhibition. There will be lots of photos on my social media channels and website of the exhibition though.

It all began with this piece, which began as exploring the cycle of life and passing on to the next generation. However it just wasn't working as a whole piece. The individual elements are made of Tyvek and after deciding this was too linear and close together I removed the elements from the canvas backing.

I then took time to explore each one individually; all were made from deconstructing and reconstructing the Tyvek - a theme that runs through my work. It then started to become obvious that really they were about identity and hidden elements.

From the Tyvek pieces I moved on to explore the deconstruction and reconstruction themes in more details using different types of paper. Paper is perfect for this theme of identity as we all have a story to tell and stories are often on paper.

The papers quickly became more sculptural and architectural, bringing in the elements I had been drawn to with the Tyvek.

After exploring and pushing the boundaries of the papers, this sculptural sample was created and at this time I really thought that this would be the very basis of a large sculptural focal piece for the exhibition.

So I made a series of larger and larger samples, by this point they had words embroidered on to the samples exploring identity. However, it wasn't to be. I knew the focal piece needed to be large scale to have the impact I wanted but this shape just wasn't working. It was hard to let go of this as I'd such a clear image in my mind and so many hours had been spent refining and refining.

I decided to try one last time with a very thick architects tracing paper, and whilst it was better and I found the materials to be perfect for the theme it still wouldn't scale up in the way that I needed it to.

After many hours more of thinking, deciding perhaps this wasn't a good idea for an exhibition after all! and much more thinking the decision was made to take the sculptural elements, the tracing paper and the words and see where that took me.

This is where it took me! The image shows just one of the blocks that will make up the large, sculptural focal piece for the exhibition. It explores seemingly positive personality traits and considers how they can be negative - such as brutal honesty or embellish the truth.

I do hope that you're able to come and see my Identity exhibition - it's at Bottleworks from 23rd - 26th May 2025, 11am to 8pm each day. More details can be found here. For those who can't get there, I will be posting a video walkthrough of the exhibition on my social media channels.