Rachael Singleton
I am a textile and mixed media artist myself, but like so many, I found myself feeling anxious at the start of the pandemic. This was not primarily because the situation but because staying at home exasperated anxiety about some flood damage we had experienced the month before. This project allowed me to work towards a small goal which kept me busy and I found it extremely therapeutic to have something to pick up and add to especially in the evenings. I was fortunate to work at home as a key worker but my job was stressful and having a minute or two here and there to stitch was relaxing.
I tend to work conceptually and am happiest using papers, fabrics, threads and other materials to create layered and complex surfaces. The natural world is a major of inspiration where I am drawn to the smaller objects around me. Containment is also an enduring preoccupation. I look up and around for a sense of wellbeing but look down and in to feed my artistic curiosity.
As the pandemic started, like many others, it saw me reeling and coping with the situation. Mental energy was needed in my key worker role and initially the inner resource for creativity decreased.
I have a background in painting but over the years I have explored various disciplines such as ceramics, art journaling and the more traditional fields of embroidery which have given me a variety of skills.
Rachael Singleton
My work includes a set of three textile art bobbin scrolls. These were made as part of a ‘Soul 4 the Soul’ project by Anne Brooke. Anne is a friend from an embroidery guild. She offered a weekly challenge to include various stitched elements over several weeks and supported this through videos. The community grew quickly under the Instagram hashtag #sew4thesoulhannemade and there are a number of ‘community’ videos showing the work made across the world.
The scrolls are made by piecing fabric onto cotton wadding before adding hand-stitch and additional elements. They are all backed with calico and can be displayed in a variety of ways. I dyed many of the threads, materials and notions myself, and spent a long time designing the colourways so that they were visually pleasing and celebrated three of the plants that grew in my garden over the period: hellebores, bluebells and honeysuckle.
Since completing them, I have returned to my own work but I look back at them very fondly as three positive little pieces that ‘kept me going’ through Spring 2020.
The pandemic also created a lot of time to reflect as my workshops, events and talks stopped. Creativity returned and it has actually been an extraordinarily productive time as I look back. I created the ‘Busy Bodies’ as simple textile memory keepers. They were a way for me to celebrate daily walks from home and memories of places we could no longer travel to. Busy Bodies are primitive characters made from eco-dyed fabrics and threads and natural stuffing. People from around the world have been sharing them on Instagram using #stitchabusybody as in turn, I was able to offer a simple textile project to others.
My presence on social media has grown and I have had some exciting opportunities to work with others. I am busy organising an on-line exhibition for WOVEN in Kirklees on behalf of Hillstone Fibre Arts and in collaboration with Taylor and Lodge, and I have been successful in gaining Arts Council funding for a project to investigate the translation of textile surface into bronze sculpture which will see me doing a residency in Ireland later this year. This is a hugely exciting opportunity and has been designed around being in lockdown or restrictions for much of the period, and the additional time I have because of it.
