Drapes was my first large-scale installation, commissioned by curator Hannah Rose for the Mirror Gallery at the University of Plymouth in 2016 to launch its Textiles Season, which also featured British designers Alistair McAuley and Paul Simmons of Timorous Beasties and Kit Kemp.
Rather than hanging paintings on walls, I wanted the paintings to become the walls.
Measuring 3.5 × 4 × 5 metres (11.5 × 13 × 16 feet), Drapes consisted of ten suspended textile elements. Using satin polyester as a volumetric medium, the installation transformed the gallery into an immersive environment in which colour, pattern and material occupied architectural space. Each element employed repeating motifs, limited palettes and expanses of superflat colour that echoed one another, allowing the work to unfold rhythmically as visitors moved through it.
The title Drapes draws together several meanings: the French drapeaux (flags), the act of draping and the long histories in which cloth has been used to communicate identity, authority and power. Throughout history, textiles have carried political, cultural and psychological significance. Flags, garments and ceremonial fabrics all demonstrate how cloth can become far more than material; it can shape the emotional experience of a place.
While developing the installation, I found myself returning to historical images of monumental flags suspended across civic architecture, particularly those deployed by Nazi Germany. What interested me was not simply their symbolism but their extraordinary ability to transform architecture into an instrument of psychological power. Cloth could become oppressive. It could overwhelm, dominate and alter the atmosphere of an entire environment.
That realisation resonated with my own experience of living alongside different forms of emotional, familial and inherited weight. Rather than illustrating autobiography, I wanted Drapes to evoke the sensation of carrying forces that feel larger than oneself: silence, denial, grief, inherited trauma and the persistence of memory. The installation invites visitors to move through states of knowing and unknowing, where repetition, scale and colour oscillate between beauty and unease.
People often describe my work as textile-based, but I think of it as an expanded form of painting. I began working with cloth partly because it was a more affordable support than traditional artists’ canvas. Over time, however, I became increasingly interested in the support itself. Instead of concealing the weave beneath paint, I wanted the material to remain visible and active, contributing its own structure, movement and history to the work. In Drapes, cloth is no longer the surface upon which painting happens—it becomes the painting itself.
The installation also emerged from my longstanding interest in questioning the expectations placed upon printed textiles. Using a combination of hand-drawn and digital processes, I wanted to demonstrate that printed textiles need not be confined to commercial products or seasonal fashion. They could operate as ambitious contemporary artworks capable of engaging with architecture, philosophy and the history of painting.
These ideas developed through my work with Professor Rebecca Earley and Textiles Environment Design at the University of the Arts London, and later informed the establishment of Textiles Hub London. Hannah Rose and I saw the exhibition as an opportunity to foreground forms of material research and experimentation that are often overlooked within British art, craft and design histories.
The installation was accompanied by a constellation of related works—including pastel and acrylic paintings, digital animations and stitched textiles—which I described as Grid Drawings, Digital Sequences and Quilted Paintings. Rather than functioning as separate works, they revealed the visual thinking, material experiments and iterative processes from which Drapes emerged, inviting viewers into the generative language behind the installation.
Looking back, Drapes marks a decisive moment in the evolution of my practice. It was the first work in which painting expanded beyond the stretched canvas into architecture itself. Rather than depicting power, the installation sought to materialise it, allowing cloth, colour and scale to shape the viewer’s bodily experience of space.
In this sense, Drapes continues my exploration of an expanded language of painting. Contemporary materials are not simply supports for images; they become painterly media in their own right. The work proposes that painting can extend beyond the canvas into lived space, where material, architecture and embodied experience become inseparable.
Project Information
Title
Drapes
Date
2016
Medium
Digitally printed satin polyester installation
Dimensions
3.5 × 4 × 5 m (11.5 × 13 × 16 ft)
Commission
Mirror Gallery, University of Plymouth
Exhibition dates
10 January – 23 February 2016
Curator
Hannah Rose
Photography
Sarah Packer