Latest Artwork

For my brother's birthday I decided to make him a number of characters from the ngmoco/hand circus game Rolando 2 - Quest for the golden orchid. The original characters were designed by Mikko Walamies and can be seen here at the rolando 2 website

From left to right; the Floating Friend, Lord Derby Disraeli (royal treasurer), the King rolando, Major James Cardigan (royal spiky commando), Turgut Reiss (reformed pirate) and Mr Scruff, the DJ who made the music for the game. I posed them with a 30 cm ruler and a standard wine bottle to give you an idea of the scale. The small rolandos were patterned off a superball. The King was patterned off a lemon, and the Floating Friend from an orange. They are made out of polar fleece and/or corduroy, hand coloured and embroidered.

My brother took some (much nicer) photos which I have included just below:

The floating friend has two forms, the one I made was the huge floating sphere the friend becomes when he eats chilli.

 I hope you enjoy my interpretations of these rolandos.

I'm not sure where the idea came from, but I had to do a project that incorporated some kind of stitching for textiles at uni. 

So I built on my Beth Gibbons embroidery into some crazy multilayered eye embroidery applique.

It's not actually very easy to photograph or scan because it's not a perfect square.

I decided to play on the richness of patterned fabrics - brocades, silk charmeuses, burnout velvets and shimmering satins and silks, combined with the dazzling bejewelled effect of both stylised and more realistic eyes.

Hopefully you enjoy it more than my teachers did. The textiles teachers are really quite harsh, and one of them seemed to think I didn't display the necessary commitment even though I spent THREE WEEKS non stop doing this! I'm actually seriously considering transferring workshops - even though I love the work in textiles I'm really not sure I can keep on for another two and a half years with such critical and demanding teachers.

 Oh well..I'm proud even if they aren't.

At university we've been doing textile arts (seeing as I do a textiles course) and we are focusing on knitting and crochet. I am not warming to crochet but seeing as I am already a reasonably competent knitter with a little fair isle experience, I've been trying to knit pictures.

I'm going to knit my self portrait tomorrow (with luck) but this is a little practice piece, it took a couple of hours from drawing the chart to casting off the knitting. It's about 10.5cm by 13cm, and it's a cow skull.

Needless to see it's not terribly easy to knit an image, and the skull got a bit..lost..so hopefully the self portrait will be better!