I am an artist working in soft sculpture as a process of remembering through making. The knowledge of each hand-knitted stitch has been passed down to me, through six generations of women in my family. The repetitive, instinctive action of the hand and needle becomes a ritual. With every knot and loop I make, I weave a closer connection to those around me and those who came before me and those to come after me.

Recently, fibre as a material has been validated as a contemporary form of sculpture. The use of fibre in sculpture is an expanded notion, which I use to challenge the notion of traditional sculpture through unconventional materials and by embracing domestic practices and placing them in a contemporary sculptural context. In my practice, I use the spider as a metaphor for these feminine and domestic experiences and skills. Throughout history, spiders have been attributed to the skill of knitting and weaving and have been given a female sensibility, with the Black Widow spider, Arachne in Greek mythology and Louise Bourgeois with her ‘Maman’ spider sculptures.

Within my practice, I see myself as a spider and construct environments from fibre, in the spaces between things. My process, material and stitch choices depend on the space, light, wind, sounds, smells, and the tactility of the existing materials in that space. I use discarded and foraged fabrics, like lambswool from barbed wire fences and metal wire. Organic forms merge with a human-made materiality, dissolving false boundaries between human and Nature. I construct webs in untouched and forgotten spaces. I create small intimate objects, as if shrinking to spider size, and immersive large-scale installations as if trapped in a web, like fly. Site specific work allows me to freely explore scale and when using fibre outside, the sculpture takes on a performative quality and breathes in the wind.

The webs are an attempt to capture the nexus between life and death, the remembered and the forgotten. These liminal and temporary structures have a delicate existence and allow me to weave untold stories from the past and present into the foreground of contemporary sculpture.