About Lydia
As a fine artist I specialise in quilt making and textile based media. My work centres around embodied experiences, filtered through iterative drawings, paintings and prints, culminating in hand dyed and stitched quilts.
My background is in craft, as one of the Founders, Editors and Creative Directors of Pom Pom Quarterly and our book imprint, Pom Pom Publishing. I love exploring the intersection between art and craft, and use my work to reclaim techniques that have been systematically devalued because of their association with femininity. As an artist I engage with an act of remembering something which has always been true; textiles are a medium as rich in expressive potential as any other.
I gravitate towards abstract interpretations and enjoy the creation of metaphorical motifs that represent moments, feelings or experiences for me, which I can then utilise as part of my visual language. When realising my designs in textile form the creation of one motif or design leads to a collection of scrap fabrics which can be used in improvisational ways as a response to the original, intended, shapes. I like to combine these intentional and improvisational processes; the consequential shapes allow me to work in an intuitive way, but in order to create them I have to start with the intended motif. I am interested in the line that separates these two ways of creating work, and how to walk that line.
I recently completed an MA in Fine Art at Norwich University of the Arts. Previously I had completed a BA and MA in Linguistics at Manchester University, where I focussed on grammatical semantics. I still love thinking about the parallels between the structures and nuances in language and my work with textiles.