Honey Comb Smocking

Honey Comb Smocking was a duo show with Alice Walter at Liquid Gold Studios, London in December 2022. Exhibition text was written by Alice Walter:

Honeycomb smocking: a type of smocking (the embroidery technique of creating a series of pleats and then stitching these pleats together at certain points to provide stretch and give) that results in a diamond formation, unknown in origin but believed to have surfaced during medieval times.

Hannah and I graduated from Painting together at the University of Brighton in 2014; Hannah is an artist working in sculpture, textiles and sound and my work is predominantly painting with increasing elements of assemblage and construction. In many ways our work has pursued opposite directions since graduating, but I feel like we both in different ways make ‘fever-objects’ which somehow, despite being abstracted and non-moving, feel alive like vulnerable, exposed beings, that call out for affection but look to hungrily carve a sense of independence and presence for themselves. This makes it feel like the works can absorb our own sense of friendship and distance and so, in the context of the exhibition, the writing below is a playfully written love letter from myself and my work to Hannah and hers.

‘Before, I wrote about the colour you use that I can’t use, that I can write about because you can use it as more than a colour, which it is more than, which is why I can’t use it. Now, the safety of your works’ cushioning means that my work can bounce off your work like the moon. I am always peering over the edge of the painting, looking where I cannot see – when I fall, you catch me in your compartments of design and method, cast within a protective halo of piping. I am scared of about breaking out, try as I might, and so a bit rigid, in my escapades; you are scared of looking inside (though you always venture within, regardless) and so you have a guiding light, like a planets. And this wobbling of yours, as I creak, sawing up bits of wood: it makes a chorus that has a rhythm like a pendulum thats flawed, like we are.