In 2019, Arts Council England awarded me a Developing Your Creative Practice grant for a project titled Painting into Textiles & Back Again: Technique Exploration & Experimentation for Large-scale Installations.

Looking back, the full title describes an important point of consolidation within my practice. The significant words are not only painting and textiles, but into and back again. I was not proposing a departure from painting in favour of another discipline. I was interested in what might be discovered by allowing painting to move into another material language and, crucially, what that encounter might subsequently bring back to painting.

The award enabled me to investigate this movement more deliberately, building upon the large-scale installations I had recently developed through Drapes and Memory of Colour. It provided a period in which technique, material, scale and installation could be treated as forms of artistic research, extending questions that had already begun to emerge through the work.

Painting and Its Support

One of those questions concerned the apparently straightforward relationship between a painting and the material that supports it.

Canvas is itself a textile, yet within the conventions of Western easel painting its woven structure is generally prepared in order to disappear. Once stretched, sized and primed, cloth becomes the support for an image rather than an active element within it. Its flexibility, weave, weight, edges and capacity to fold are suppressed in favour of the stable rectangle.

My work increasingly reversed this relationship. I became interested in what might happen when the textile support was permitted to remain materially present and to influence the form of the painting itself.

Cloth could fold, drape, repeat, overlap and respond to gravity. It could move with air and alter according to the architecture in which it was installed. Pattern could extend beyond the dimensions of a single surface, while colour could begin to operate spatially, establishing relationships between individual works, buildings and bodies.

This did not represent a rejection of painting. Rather, it allowed me to examine assumptions about where a painting begins and ends, and about which of its constituent materials and processes are permitted to remain visible.

From Object to Atmosphere

Drapes had already begun this enquiry at architectural scale. Across its different installations, the work changed according to the spaces it occupied. Printed surfaces could be clustered, separated, suspended high above the viewer or encountered at bodily scale. The same elements could produce markedly different spatial and psychological effects when reconfigured within another building.

The Arts Council project allowed me to pursue the implications of this more consciously. I became increasingly interested in painting not only as an object but as a means of producing atmosphere.

This shifted the question from what a painting represents towards what a painting might do. Colour could establish a spatial condition. Pattern could alter the perception of architecture. A surface could surround the viewer rather than remain positioned opposite them. The physical encounter with a work—moving towards it, beneath it, around it or through it—could become part of the work’s meaning.

Painting, understood in this way, was no longer confined to the rectangle on the wall. It could operate as an environment while remaining connected to the histories, languages and material decisions of painting.

Into Textiles and Back Again

The reciprocal movement contained in the title of the DYCP has become increasingly important to me.

Working with textiles changed the way I thought about painting. Repetition became more significant. So did scale, surface, flexibility, construction and the relationship between an image and the architecture surrounding it. Textile processes introduced ways of thinking in which an image did not necessarily have a single orientation or fixed edge.

But these discoveries could also travel back into paintings made on paper, board or conventionally stretched and framed supports.

I am currently making rectangular works for walls again, and I do not experience this as a retreat from expanded painting. The earlier investigation changed what the rectangle means to me. Once painting has been considered as cloth, pattern, installation, architecture and atmosphere, returning to a framed surface does not undo that knowledge.

The movement is therefore genuinely into textiles and back again. Each material encounter alters the next.

Material Knowledge

This process has also made me increasingly conscious of the forms of knowledge contained within making itself.

The behaviour of cloth cannot be understood entirely in advance of handling it. Scale changes the behaviour of an image. A repeat produces relationships that do not exist within the original drawing. Gravity changes an installation. Architecture introduces conditions that cannot be resolved solely within the studio.

Materials are therefore not passive recipients of an idea already completed in the artist’s mind. They participate in determining what the work becomes.

This understanding connects Painting into Textiles & Back Again to questions that recur elsewhere in my practice: the histories carried by materials, the intelligence embedded in processes of making, and the possibility that forms of knowledge traditionally associated with textiles, pattern, repetition, decoration and the hand have sometimes remained peripheral to dominant accounts of contemporary painting.

Allowing the support to become visible is therefore not merely a formal decision. It makes another body of knowledge visible with it.

Encounters and Continuities

The DYCP also produced encounters that have continued beyond the period of the award itself.

Part of my Arts Council funding supported my participation in the Summer Programs at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles in 2019. It was there that I met curator Dr Jareh Das, who was participating in the Emerging Curators Retreat taking place at Otis at the same time.

Our practices were different, but I have continued to follow Jareh’s curatorial work and writing. Her subsequent articulation of a practice founded upon sustained dialogue with living artists, close attention to artistic processes and what she describes as “works in flux” and art “in a state of becoming” has increasingly resonated with the way I understand my own work.

There is something important to me about the fact that we first encountered one another while each of us was engaged in a period of development. The residency was not simply a place in which to produce an immediate outcome. It created conditions for conversations, observations and relationships whose significance could emerge over a much longer period.

Jareh and I subsequently received Developing Your Creative Practice awards during the same funding period. So too did artist Ptolemy Mann, whose relationship to my own history reaches further back. Ptolemy and I entered the Royal College of Art in the same year, 1995: she began the MA in Constructed Textiles while I began the doctoral research through which I was investigating printing processes and material transformation.

More than two decades later, our respective Arts Council projects approached the relationship between painting and textiles from different directions. Ptolemy’s project, Thread Painting – Exploring the Relationship between Dyeing Thread and Painting on Paper, developed a practice grounded in colour, dye and weaving towards painting. My own Painting into Textiles & Back Again investigated the movement of painting through textile processes, large-scale construction and installation.

I find this convergence interesting because it suggests that disciplinary categories are less stable than the histories of the techniques contained within them. Painting can acquire knowledge from weaving; weaving can alter an understanding of painting; colour can move between pigment, dye, thread, print and digital image. What matters is not necessarily which category finally contains the work, but what becomes possible through movement between them.

Works in Continuance

Jareh’s attention to artistic processes in flux intersects with, but is not identical to, something I have come to recognise within my own practice and now think of as Works in Continuance.

For me, continuance describes the persistence of an artistic question, image, material process or body of work beyond the moment at which it might conventionally be considered complete. A work may be exhibited, dismantled and stored, yet remain active within subsequent thinking. A technique developed through one project may reappear years later in another medium. An image may move between drawing, digital pattern, cloth, animation or architecture without any one manifestation necessarily becoming its definitive form.

This also applies to relationships and knowledge. A conversation with another artist or curator may remain dormant and become significant years later. An institutional encounter can open a line of enquiry that continues elsewhere. Knowledge acquired through one material can migrate into another, while ideas formed in teaching, curating or conversation can return unexpectedly to the studio.

Seen retrospectively, Painting into Textiles & Back Again was an important articulation of this process. The phrase back again resisted a linear account of artistic development in which one medium, technique or body of work supersedes another. It proposed instead that knowledge could circulate between materials and forms, with each encounter modifying what followed.

I increasingly understand artistic development not as a sequence of replacements, but as an accumulation of materials, techniques, encounters, places and histories that remain capable of being reactivated.

The question artists are frequently asked—What comes next?—can therefore be surprisingly difficult for me to answer. It implies a forward trajectory in which one project concludes and another begins. My experience of practice has been more circular and cumulative. Earlier works return. Materials reappear. Conversations resume after years. Relationships with artists, curators and institutions develop at different speeds, while a technique learnt in one context may acquire significance much later in another.

This circularity does not mean remaining in the same place. Each return occurs from a different position. An earlier idea is encountered with another decade of experience; an old technique meets a new technology; a familiar material enters another architecture; a conversation begun in one city resumes somewhere else.

Perhaps this is why Works in Continuance feels more accurate to me than the expectation of continually producing the next thing. An artistic practice is also a life journey. Its different stages do not simply replace one another. They accumulate, overlap, recede and return, continually altering the meaning of what came before as well as what might follow.

The work continues, but so do the dialogues and relationships through which it becomes possible.

People, Places and Histories

I am increasingly interested in how these material transformations connect artworks to larger networks of people, places and histories.

No artwork emerges from material or intellectual isolation. Techniques have histories; materials have sources; processes carry accumulated knowledge. Curators, teachers, fabricators, institutions and other artists can alter the direction in which a work develops. Buildings change how it is encountered, while subsequent exhibitions can reveal aspects of a work that were not apparent in its first presentation.

This has become increasingly visible to me while reconsidering my own work across time. The recycled polythene used in Billboard Skirts, the printed cloth of Drapes, the digital transformations developed through my work at the V&A, the ceramic transfer of Cloud Buds, and the material investigations supported by Painting into Textiles & Back Again do not now appear as discrete episodes. They form a continuing enquiry into how images and materials acquire meaning by moving between forms and contexts.

Such movement can also bring overlooked knowledge into view. The textile beneath a painting, the labour contained in a stitch, the source of a material, the behaviour of a repeat, or the contribution of a maker can all disappear when attention is directed solely towards the finished image.

My interest is increasingly in allowing those histories to remain present.

An Expanded Field of Painting

The Arts Council award did not resolve these questions, nor would I now want it to have done so. Its importance lay in giving me the opportunity to pursue them through experimentation.

The project helped me understand expanded painting not as a stylistic category but as a way of working: a willingness to allow painting to encounter other materials, technologies, scales and spaces, and to permit those encounters to alter what painting subsequently becomes.

This remains central to my practice.

A painting may occupy a conventional rectangle on a wall, but it may also become cloth, pattern, installation, projected light, digital movement or an architectural surface. One possibility does not invalidate another; each extends the vocabulary available to the next.

Painting into Textiles & Back Again therefore describes something I continue to do. The movement is outward, but it is also recursive. Rather than progressing along a single line, the practice moves more like a spiral, returning to earlier materials, questions and relationships from a changed position and with the accumulated knowledge of what has happened in between.

Perhaps this is a more truthful way for me to think about the question What comes next?

Not necessarily the next thing, but the next configuration of everything already in motion.

Award

Developing Your Creative Practice (DYCP)
Arts Council England
2019–2020

Painting into Textiles & Back Again: Technique Exploration & Experimentation for Large-scale Installations

A period of artistic research and development investigating relationships between painting, textile support, technique, repetition, scale, construction and site-specific installation.

The project developed from my ongoing enquiry into painting beyond the conventional stretched canvas and the capacity of colour, pattern and material to operate spatially and architecturally.

Further information: Arts Council England — Developing Your Creative Practice