Creative Development Projects

I have recently started to explore new avenues of creative development, which I’m enjoying enormously…

Returning to the drawing board (literally!) I’ve been attending life and portrait drawing and painting classes at the wonderful City Lit. Learning about portraiture in particular has resonated. From a technical point of view, studying the planes and structure of a face and head has echoes with navigating face and head shapes for hat designing and making. And perhaps the aim to capture a personality as much as a physical likeness has an intangible connection to helping clients select a hat that not only suits their face shape but also reflects their personality.

Alongside this, I have been developing stitch as a medium for a series of small 3-dimensional abstract ‘samplers’. I see these as transitional pieces, a dialogue between millinery and textile art and sculpture. The use of hand-stitching to give form and solidity comes from my experience in building my own hat blocks over the years. And I can see how using stitch for mark-making and colour-mixing complements the drawing and painting experience I have been gaining.

Story-telling, and researching and reflecting on themes, have always been factors within my hat designs, and more recently the lightshade designs. This exploratory new work is proving to be a good vehicle to really develop those aspects of my creative process, giving more depth and space to the stories and themes, whether personal, social or political.

Images above: Samplers 1-3 on display at Cockpit Open Studios, Summer 2024.
See more from the series so far here >

Below: drawings and paintings from life models,
City Lit courses, 2024-2025