We’re partnering with Portland Institute of Contemporary Art to profile artists in their 2025 TBA festival. Next up, Essex and London-based Freddie Robins, who performs on Sept. 13 from 12–5 pm. Get your tickets to the rest of TBA’s amazing performances here.
Q: How would you describe your relationship to the West Coast?
A: It’s a relatively new relationship instigated by friendship and art. I visited with my husband and daughter in 2008 when my husband was showing at the Seattle Art Fair. We spent a week in Seattle then drove around the Olympic Peninsula enjoying the giant trees in the National Park, Forks (especially John’s Beachcombing Museum), and everything else that we experienced all the way round to Aberdeen and then on to Portland. A number of my former students from the MA Textiles programme at the Royal College of Art in London now live in Portland as they work for Nike. This will be my third time in Portland so I guess that we are beyond the “honeymoon stage” but I am definitely not in the uncertainty/disillusion stage. I love it here.
Q: Name one thing you’ve read, looked at, watched, or listened to this month that left an impression on you:
A: I am re-reading Deborah Levy’s three-part “living autobiography” on writing and womanhood; Things I Don’t Want to Know, The Cost of Living and Real Estate. She says it like it is. There are too many great quotations to give you so I suggest that you go out and buy the series, unless you aren’t interested in either creativity or womanhood, and then these books really aren’t for you. In that case my work and I am not really for you either.
Q: When did your artistic journey begin and what was the spark?
A: The spark was my godmother, my mother’s childhood friend, Pamela Darking. She was an amazing dressmaker, having grown up with a father who was a tailor. She was skilled in all sorts of textiles processes but she didn’t work with any of them professionally. She made all of my, my sister’s, and my mother’s clothes. She made us versions of things that we wanted to buy but couldn’t afford. She passed many of her skills on to me. I adored her. She was a single, independent woman so I viewed the making of textiles and clothes as the activities of a contemporary woman.
Q: How has your work changed in the last five years?
A: I started to combine my use of knitting and yarn with a much broader range of materials. When Covid hit the UK, and we were in lockdown, we accumulated so many small cardboard boxes from all the online shopping that we were doing. I started using these as ‘houses’ for small three-dimensional collage works. These collages were composed of materials that I found around my studio, and on the farm where we live and walked daily. I named this series of works Farmmages in reference to Miriam Schapiro and Melissa Meyer’s Femmages. Femmages are a feminist collage art form that incorporates what are usually viewed as “feminine” materials and techniques. My works are exactly this but with natural materials found on the farm thrown in the mix. Now, having broadened out in terms of materials and form, I am returning to simply knitting, and working with the softest materials that I can lay my hands on.
Q: If you had to choose a new medium to work with, what would it be?
A: I don’t want to choose a new creative medium to work with, but IF I were forced to, it would be writing. I am surprised to find myself saying this. Words are so dominant and here I am willing to be dominated.
Q: Shared workspace or solo studio?
A: Solo, solo, solo. I don’t like sharing anything.
Q: Five artists, dead or alive, that you’d invite to dinner:
A: Frida Kahlo, Phyllida Barlow, Helen Chadwick, Annette Messager, Faith Ringgold, Judy Chicago, Sophie Calle, Cecilia Vicuna, Marie-Rose Lortet, and Mrinalini Mukherjee. They could share chairs.
Q: What’s the most surprising thing you’ve learned recently, art-related or not?A: That you have to retrain your brain to focus through varifocal (progressive) lenses. I can’t see with them. I can’t see without them?