From 1996 to around 2004, I was busy building up a weaving business. I started out weaving bridal fabrics and selling them to bridal shops, but I was out on the road a lot with a young son at home and realised this was not sustainable for family life. So fashion accessories sold through craft shows was my next attempt. Being a bit of a perfectionist was not conducive to swift turnaround of work and I am not a sales-person! But more than anything else, none of this fed my soul. I had lost my passion and was just going through the motions. Things had to change.

David Attenborough was the catalyst. The Blue Planet had amazing images. And one caught my imagination. I just had to weave it. A series of 3 pieces called Deep Sea followed, with the requirement to learn network drafting in order to capture the wave motion. I was back!!!! The Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery selected Shoal to be in their long-running exhibition How Art is Made which ran from 2006 – 2012.

The Hubble Deep Space Telescope was also sending back incredible images that were beyond anything the general public had seen before, and I decided to explore this using fabric dyes on my own bridal fabrics. Deep Space was a series that developed from that, and my favourite piece is the Sagitarrius piece included here.