My work is a meeting point, between early experiences with making and fabric 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 paper 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.

Maxine Sutton 2024