My work is a meeting point, between early creative experiences with textiles in my childhood, and my formal art education in Fine Art / Painting. Textile exists as both form and content in my work. Overlapping themes, from women’s stories, ecology, home, leftovers & waste, to gardens & anatomy permeate my process in cycles.

Much of the work expresses a dialogue between screen-print & embroidery and gives form to a universal human connection to cloth. In processes that embrace intuition & chance, my practice questions the gaps, crossovers & hierarchies between craft & fine art making. I work with found, recycled and organic fabrics, and also make works on paper, often experimenting with taking imprints of ink saturated forms from the cloth during the screen printing process.

I coax and wrestle abstract constructions and stories from the materials I collect, during which, conversations are played out between the dualities of cloth and paper, art and craft, ‘picture’ and pattern, wet and dry, playful and anxious. Through a layered process, often working with scraps and leftovers, my work explores the uncertainty, disarray, and fragmentation of our existence, together with a compulsion to reconstitute and reclaim. Drawing is the foundation of my formal art training and so whether with pencil, brush, thread or scissors, drawing continues as a framework. An obsession with colour, moving in and out of shape, also underpins my process.

Maxine Sutton 2024