Wendy Cotterill
Worcester, UK
Making art with a sewing machine is not the same as making textiles-mediated artefacts, but it is a distinction defended with the confidence of someone who has read all the theory and most of the footnotes!
Working chiefly in machine embroidery and other digital techniques, Wendy treats the humble sewing machine less as a domestic appliance and more as technology quietly being hacked to do things its manufacturer never signed off on.
Stitch, fabric, and thread are not the destination; they are part of the language through which artists explore and engage the world around them, bringing together diverse practices that may be political, personal, conceptual, experimental, digital, material or deliberately difficult to categorise. And when textiles are treated as a serious and expansive contemporary art medium they invites audiences to look again at what textiles can mean, or become.
Textiles are the medium. Ideas are the point.
Photographs: By the artist