Layers of Meaning

Claire Heathcote - Narrative Figures

"Claire Heathcote is a graduate from Goldsmiths College where she studied Textile. Her work looks at the way thread can transform from a drawing tool to a medium able to say something about the person being drawn."

"Claire Heathcote's delicate embroidered portraits capture modern life in mid gesture. The impact of her faces - images gleaned from magazines and reduced to a collection of graphic planes and simple outlines - is strangely amplified by the relative intimacy of embroidery. Occasional loose threads connect us to the making process and trail across the surface like a line of thought left unresolved."

"My work is almost always portrait based. I find peoples' expressions and features very interesting, and I tend to embroider pictures of people that catch my eye, that look a little unusual or glamorous. My starting points are usually images from magazines, films or books, and I think my work benefits from this distance between me and the subject.

Another aspect of my work focuses on thread as a drawing tool. Sometimes I use it in a very controlled way and at other times play with the loose threads to speculate on the subjects' personality, or the situation they are in."

All of the above quotes are taken from the respective web pages. When embroidery begins to gather the meaning and line quality of drawing, it suddenly becomes intensely interesting to me. There is something overly balnd about the embroidered line that is continuous, smooth and in-control. Heathcote has managed to break both the line and the restraint simultaneously! Delightful and provoking.