Full Circle
From cloth to slate
This week I return to the Bothy Gallery to share work-in-progress from Wrapped in Cold Hard Comfort. Presenting the material enquiry that that was needed to underpin it: as I try and give this rock a sense of materiality. The testing, the resistance, the failures and adjustments that shape the final form.
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My 2022 residency here, as part of On Queer Ground, marked a decisive shift in my practice. Collecting and stitching people’s stories into a quilt led me to reconsider the quilt not only as a narrative surface but as a sculptural structure. Weight, gravity and display became as significant as stitch and pattern. Since then, I have approached textiles as forms that occupy space, assert mass and carry tension.
Wrapped in Cold Hard Comfort extends this investigation by using quilting techniques with slate. The material’s density and demand a different approach of making. Each segment is marked, drilled and stitched by hand. The process is exacting and physically demanding.
The work deliberately confronts the conventional associations of textiles with softness, pliability and domestic comfort. By stitching into stone, I reconfigure those assumptions. The slate’s weight is literal, but it is also structural: it resists, it tests, it limits movement. In doing so, it becomes a material framework through which to consider bodies that encounter friction, constraint or ongoing adversity. When the articulated slate begins to drape and shift, a controlled flexibility emerges. The material does not soften, but it alludes to a softness and pliability.
The continued support of Sarah Coulson and the team at YSP, alongside funding from Arts Council England, has been instrumental in enabling this sustained material investigation to develop at this scale.