In July 2014 I was fortunate enough to go on a trip to Iceland and Greenland. Sailing from Liverpool (appropriately an old whaling port) we visited Reykjavik where I saw orca, as well as a wide range of traditional tools and implements made from stranded whales at the National Museum and Skogar Museum. The Icelandic term for whale bone washed …
In 2013 on my month long voyage around various Arctic Seas I saw five different species of whale and visited several whale centres, heritage whaling sites and museums with skeletons of whales on display. A series of quilted textile pieces evolved from sketches and photographs of the skeletons, maps both current and historic of the locations where I saw the …
I was at Time and Tide a couple of weeks ago for a photoshoot of my whales and Moby Dick related textiles amongst their wonderful maritime history displays. I had a great time working with their photographer and I’m really pleased with the photos.
For those of you not on Facebook I thought I’d repost this, a description of this summer’s epic trip up north (a month on the MV Discovery) “saw five species of whales, more harpoons and whale bones than a normal person should, the site of the world’s oldest parliament, puffins, gannets, white tailed sea eagles, various skuas, several Russian orthodox …
Want a whale of your own? Look no further! These are my limited edition sperm whales. They are approximately 30 cm long, made of custom printed fabric (designed by me based on text from Moby Dick). They are filled with non allergenic toy stuffing and sewn together by me in my studio in Norfolk. This will be a limited edition …
For a few years I have been making fabric whales which I gift to people on the condition that they send me photos of their whale. From my own and other contributions I have put together and published an illustration only version of Moby Dick containing a curated selection of these whale photographs. http://www.blurb.co.uk/bookstore/detail/3654599 You can preview the whole thing …
I was fortunate enough to visit Spitsbergen in the summer of 2012. An island on the west of the Svalbard archipelago, by a quirk of climatology the gulf stream keeps this warmer than the rest of the arctic at this latitude which means that you can get up as near as 700 miles from the North Pole with not too …
As I have previously mentioned I often buy fabric when I visit places, and on a short stop over on the Norwegian coastal town of Alesund in 2011 I happened upon a craft and fabric shop where I spied a rather garish woven remnant in orange and turquoise in the sale bin. As I suspected it made a lovely whale, one …
For many years Melville’s classic Moby Dick has been at the heart of my work, but I always shied away from producing work with obvious whale imagery as it never felt like it was truely my work. It was not until 2008 that I saw my first whales in the wild (killer whales in Scotland), and even they didn’t really fit …
Artists Statement I read Moby Dick in the summer of 2001 and had I known, I wouldn’t have picked it up. I should have guessed how dangerous a book it could be as I was lead to it by seeing some of the huge body of work that American abstract artist Frank Stella had made in response to the work. …