Estuary from the air…

4 Apr

In 2021 I entered a piece for an open call by the wonderfully named ‘Worshipful Company of Broderers’ for an exhibition called ‘The Art of Embroidery’. The piece was accepted and exhibited at Bankside Gallery in central London in February 2022 alongside the work of many talented emerging and established embroidery based artists.

My piece ‘Estuary from the Air’ was based on an Ariel photograph taken on a slightly scary small plane ride from Shoreham Airport booked as a special day for my partner’s Birthday. On that beautiful clear June day the view of the estuary at Pagham Harbour was mesmerising, the aqua water and pale golden sands looked very other-worldly, hard to believe I was looking at an area of Bognor Regis!

The site is run by the RSPB and their website states that roughly half of the reserve is salt marsh and mudflats, with the remainder farmland, copses, lagoons, reed beds and shingle beaches. It is one of the few undeveloped stretches of the Sussex Coast, a sanctuary for birds and people, for whom it also provide some natural flood defences.

In creating the piece I wanted to maintain the sustainable theme as I do in many of my textile pieces, using fabric offcuts from my natural dyeing including dahlia, indigo, weld over-dyed with indigo, cutch and alkanet. Using a pieced together appliqué technique, a form of textile collage, I then hand and machine embroidered in an intuitive way, working with the curves and details in the landscape.