Pieces of Our Lives - Why I use textiles in my paintings.

Something clicked in the studio this week.

I was pulling together a selection of paintings and found myself looking particularly closely at the textiles within them - the torn pieces of fabric, exposed threads, layers disappearing underneath paint and texture.

At the same time, I had started working on some new pieces. I was ripping fabric, pulling at threads and layering fragments into the surface, doing what I have done so many times before.

And I suddenly stopped and thought: Why do I love this so much?

Not why do I use textiles? I know many of the answers to that already.

I spent twenty years working in fashion. I've always loved fabric, texture and the tactile quality of materials. Some of the textiles I use have stories of their own - pieces of old clothing, vintage fabrics, remnants connected to people and places.

I've talked before about how fabric can hold memories.

But standing in the studio surrounded by torn pieces of material, I realised there was something else happening.

Memories come back to us in pieces

When I think about the places that mean the most to me, I don't remember them as complete pictures. I remember fragments. The colour of the water. The feeling of being cold after a swim. The pattern of sunlight moving across the sea. Something somebody was wearing. The sound of the waves. A particular conversation. The way a place made me feel at one very specific moment in my life. Tiny pieces which, individually, might seem insignificant.

And yet sometimes one of those tiny fragments is enough to bring the whole memory rushing back. A piece of fabric can do exactly the same thing. An old shirt. A scrap of a child's dress. The corner of a tablecloth. A particular pattern or texture. They're only pieces of material.

Except they're not. They can hold entire parts of our lives.

Perhaps I've been doing this all along

I think that's what stopped me in my tracks. Because this isn't a new direction for my work. I'm not suddenly going to start putting fragments of fabric into my paintings to represent memories.

They were already there.

I've been tearing, layering, covering and revealing textiles within my work for years. Some pieces remain clearly visible. Others almost disappear beneath the surface. Sometimes all that remains is an edge, a texture or a loose thread.

And perhaps that is much closer to the way memory works than I had ever consciously realised. Some memories stay incredibly vivid. Some soften with time. Some become mixed together with others.

And some are reduced to the tiniest fragment - but somehow that fragment still holds everything.

Piecing a place back together

I've always said that I don't want to simply reproduce a photograph of the coastline. Photography is an important part of my process. I take photographs and drone imagery to study the coastline, the movement of the water and the shapes created where land meets sea. But when I return to the studio, I'm not trying to recreate one frozen moment.

I'm trying to capture what it felt like to be there.

And I'm beginning to understand that perhaps the way I physically construct my paintings reflects that too. Layer by layer. Fragment by fragment. Piece by piece. Not reproducing a place exactly as it looked, but piecing together my memory of it.

The photograph might remind me where the wave broke.

But memory reminds me how it felt when it did.

The pieces of our lives

There is something else in this idea that I haven't completely unravelled yet. Places don't only hold memories of what happened there. They hold memories of who we were when we were there. The beach you visited every summer as a child. The stretch of coastline where you walked with someone you loved. The place you went when life felt difficult. The beach where your children first paddled in the sea. The place where something began. Or ended. Or changed.

We leave little pieces of ourselves in places.

And we carry little pieces of those places with us.

Perhaps that's why I have always been drawn to using fragments of fabric within my landscapes.

Textiles themselves carry traces of lives lived. I tear them apart, layer them together and embed them into another place, where they become part of something new. I've been doing that instinctively for a long time. I've just finally found the words for it.

Maybe I've never really been painting places at all.

Maybe I've been piecing together the memories we attach to them.

Gem

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