what do I do?

I make works on cloth based on the landscape in my immediate locality.

I also make sewn and machine embroidered items in support of UK charity Lurcher SOS. The sale proceeds from any items bought from the narrow dog shop are donated to LSOS. Items made by me are occasionally available in the UK via LSOS.

how did I get here?

I am self-taught in terms of the techniques and tools that I use, having not had any formal art education.

I started making things under the name “narrow dog” in 2014 to raise funds for LSOS. I have a fondness for, and inherent interest in new things. This led me to buy a sewing and embroidery combo machine in 2017, simply because machine embroidery sounded to me like it was the sort of thing that I’d like. Digital machine embroidery is one of those things you either love or abhor, there seems to be no middle ground. I was smitten, and a year later bought my first embroidery only single-needle machine, upgrading it two years later for a larger hoop, and buying digitising software so I could create my own designs. At the end of 2022 I bought a multi-needle machine, not so much for its time saving attributes, but for its live camera and scanning technology.

how do I work?

I spend time out walking every day, revisiting the same places time after time, observing the changing light as the seasons recur. I photograph aspects of the environment and reinterpret these in my work.

I use and recommend Janome and Brother brand machines & software. Check out my various machines here & software here.

what is my work about?

Always a popular question these days. While I think that my work speaks for itself: what you see is what you get, there is a common theme throughout my work best summed up as being about limen. Limen is threshold: between this and that, the noticed and unnoticed. I am fascinated by liminal spaces, transition zones between one state, condition or region and another. Places that are neither one thing nor the other but incorporate elements of both.

The point of limen is the tension of the pause before the release of action. I see limen as a permeable, penetrable border rather than a dividing line. Action becomes translation - a bringing across - of meaning.

Limen appeals to me for its ambiguity, potential and mutability. For me it incorporates the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated things: photoreality and abstraction for example, or distance and intimacy.