Entangled

Felt is made from entangled wool fibres. But so much more can be caught in that entanglement.

Besides adding other materials, mostly threads and fabrics, I almost always make work from pre-felts, often starting with bits and pieces left over from other projects or from playing with new fibre or a new idea. So there is a history of my thinking tangled up in them.

These pieces started when I pinned up on my board prefelts made from the left overs of other prefelts cut up into a big a new piece; and prefelts made ages ago that I was fed up with seeing in my stash.

Something about the way the two pieces in the middle sat reminded me of looking down from the roof top terrace of a hotel in China on the allotments or market garden in the centre of the village, with a stream running through it. The plots around the allotments contained individual houses, but some of them were being converted into small hotels or B&Bs. The modern was becoming more and more entangled with the traditional.

At the same time, I was looking through the sketchbooks I was using for walking and drawing in a small wood near where I live. I had applied for a residency at Orleans House Gallery, a local-authority run space in Twickenham.

When I wasn’t successful, I decided to carry out one part of it anyway, walking and drawing in the woods by the gallery, to see what happened. I use a small book that I can hold open in one hand and each time I go I aim to fill only 3 pages, to make it quick and easy with no pressure.

It doesn’t take long to end up with dozens of drawings like these, little glimpses into a woodland that is small but quite entangled, with paths that criss-cross it or just get lost in a tangle of shrubs.

Every experience of walking and drawing is a different tangle of the state of the woods, the weather, my mood, what catches my eye and the marks I make that day.

Entangled in these small pieces are experiences across time and space, and my ideas about how to represent the feeling of a place in a way that is both specific and universal.