2024-25
The Sea Garden Portraits
Delamore Arts 2025.
Initially inspired by the subtle shimmer of a length of blue cloth, I have spent the past year hand-embroidering these four Sea Garden Portraits.
Portraiture hopes to reveal something about the subject. The telling moment in time, the story in the context, the choices of what’s shown and what’s hidden, communicate at least as much as the expression on a face.
The underwater world gleams with such narrative glimpses.
My sea stars dream of a new constellation, the turtle nurtures her reef, the chambered nautilus keeps her pre-historic secrets with perfect self-possession, and Kanaloa, the Hawaiian god of the sea, unfurls his eight magical arms to heal and protect.
2023-24
The Allotment Series
Debut at Delamore Art Early Summer Exhibition 2024.
(All four pieces were sold to the same private collector.)
Each of the four pieces in the Allotment Series celebrates the spirit of a particular vegetable. The vintage and reclaimed fabrics used in the hand-embroidered appliqué work also tell their own, more human stories, immortalizing a grandmother’s silk kimono, a magician’s purse, a humble handkerchief.
The linen backgrounds are four quarters of an unfinished Yugoslavian table cloth donated by the late and much-loved Mirjana Novakovic.
Provenance, legacy, memories and the miracles of nature are stitched in multiple layers of significance, both personal and transcendent.
Pendragan Art Studio 