About the weaving:

I wove all these pieces whilst we have been under lockdown. At the start, everywhere was quiet and I think I was the only person going into the building to my studio to weave. Our normal lives had come to a strange stop giving time and space to reflect and to develop some new and different ideas.

We live very close to the countryside and needed to exercise. With little traffic and noise, it was easy to walk and to see large and small changes in the landscape. Leaves bursting onto bare branches, insects buzzing, birds nest building and singing as if for their lives, greens of endless variety and texture and the landscape changed from winter browns.

Red checked piece

I wove this piece in April, when we were under strict lockdown. Red is historically very powerful colour and threatening red viruses seemed to be the dominant graphic in every news report I saw. I wanted to cut into this with a deep green from the landscape and with weave structures that offered a hint of 3D.

Pastel colour pieces

I made these large wraps later in the summer. By this time our lives had settled, there was spring and then summer weather and the landscape and our gardens were full of colour of every hue and shade. Monet’s paintings of his garden at Giverney not only capture these colours but in their impressionist style and brushwork they evoke a calm dream like atmosphere that is an antidote to the anxiety and fear of the pandemic. I wanted these two shawls to be big enough to imagine wrapping yourself in Monet’s dream of summer during the dark days of winter.