Artist’s Statement

I am an Artist Weaver, creating mixed media textile art pictures combinging multi-shaft or jacquard weaving, wrapping, dyeing, painting and surface embellishments.  Textures are created through using the different properties of yarns in conflict with each other. Ongoing influences are the sea in all its guises, nature and microscopic and satellite images of the world. 

My long-term project involves gathering satellite images of the earth (and the universe) and microscopic images of the natural world of Earth.  I create my own weave structures to form the textures of the surface, and then weave with different yarns to fuse colour and texture together.  Further embellishment is added with dyeing, and occasional felting. 

Sagittarius - SHB 2005

Part of this exploration uses weave structures and yarns with differential shrinkage to create dimensional fabrics which then become the canvass for dyeing, painting and mixed media applications.  The research phase of this work is fascinating and will continue, I suspect, for the rest of my weaving life. There are so many facets to explore.  I hope to have some work on show in the Gallery and at exhibitions later this year. 

Work currently in the Gallery was inspired by aspects of water and aquatic life. In the series of Deep Sea pictures, moving water is represented using both weave structure and colour play.  I love the continual variations of light affecting the sea and the sky and a visit to the Isles of Scilly off the southernmost tip of Cornwall in Feburary 2005 led me to explore a way of capturing this constant change and a series of card-wrap pictures was born.... Seascapes. More recently I used some textural weaving I had been working on and played with dyes and acrylics to create some more general seascapes as seen from land. This has become known as the Fusion series.

I hope that my work will instill a sense of wonder and curiosity about life in its widest sense, and that the casual observer will enjoy the unspoken message of life's beauty, whilst the more inquisitive viewer will appreciate the many layers of understanding which creation offers us.

Stacey Harvey-Brown
Updated November 2007

Design & Research

Then comes research – reading the novel or scouring the internet, libraries and bookshops for information; taking the photos; making sketches; writing thoughts down; pulling postcards, cuttings from magazines, odd words which seem related, compiling them all in some sort of order into a design book or onto a mood board; then living with it for a while, letting it settle into my subconscious until it finally emerges in a form where I can begin to experiment – painting, collage, dyeing samples, working out weave structures, manipulating images on the computer – until I have something I can produce.

Then the physical practicalities of yarn-ordering, dyeing warp, dressing the loom, weaving, and then assessing what I’ve produced. Sometimes it can take a whole series until I have expressed what I set out to express. Ideas develop and sometimes your finishing point is tangentially miles away from the original concept, but one of my teachers once said to me “there are never mistakes in weaving – only opportunities”. A lovely way to approach things! 

Photos - Peter Marsh                

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