Emerging Patterns
When I began making artworks, I did so instinctively—without a clear vision or plan. It wasn’t until I looked back over my early creations that I began to recognise emerging patterns. My pieces echoed the visual language of historic textiles and traditionally feminine crafts: weaving, quilting, and needlework samplers. These echoes weren’t intentional at first, but they became unmistakable threads that ran through everything I made.
In the same way, it is only in looking back that I see that storytelling has become central to so many of my creative processes; whether designing interiors or making art. Creating a backstory—giving my work a sense of history, identity, and purpose—transforms each decorative or functional decision, about an object or a space, into part of a narrative which lends the outcome greater depth.
(See my last post ‘Riverbank’ for more on stories within my design process)
I’ve been working recently on a new series of artworks that I think of as the ‘Village’ series. As the pieces took shape I noticed a story quietly emerging, of a historic folk art maker. She wasn’t a deliberate invention—more a character who revealed herself to me in the process, becoming both a lens and a voice. I even gave her a name as she became clearer to me - as an alter ego she is ‘Nell Gane’ (Nell - a nickname of mine only used long ago by my late father and Gane - my married name that I have not chosen to adopt)
The figure of Nell has become so instrinsic to the pieces that I have been making lately that I couldn’t introduce the finished works without introducing you to Nell…
This is Nell:
Nell Gane lived in a time when women’s artistic expression was constricted; confined within the domestic sphere. Women’s crafts were deemed as primarily for amusement and accomplishment (perhaps some were but I feel it is likely many were created through boredom, frustration and expectation). As is often the case with folk artists little is definitively known about her life, but her work offers glimpses of her - these artworks are tales of their maker as much as their subjects.
The ‘village’ series is a set of diminutive passe-partout plates crafted from collaged paper and fabric scraps with ink and pencil detailing, each now bearing the signs of their age. Nell’s use of repurposed materials that she would have had available to her suggests a certain modesty, that she had no expectation that her work warranted the expense of new materials.
Nell’s is quite a graphic language; her central figures are buildings that are almost caricatures, drawn out in the naive forms found so often in needlework samplers. Her repeat patterns are suggestive of domestic articles; wallpaper, dress fabrics, book end papers; they’re at once familiar and dreamlike, simplistic in form but deep in texture from being meditatively made by hand. Using textile prints as a framing background was not uncommon but in her work it seems to personify the inner world of the buildings and perhaps their occupants. The houses are like depictions of friends - they seem as portraits of the lives within the limits of her world.
It is believed the “R&F” signature Nell uses alludes to “Ridge and Furrow,” thought to be her family business but also evoking the historic agricultural landscape of rural England. By signing her works thus she is solemnly relinquishing herself and her work as a possession of her family, or perhaps it is a quiet statement of her displeasure in such.
Figuratively Nell’s village plates with their local vernacular motifs speak to a demure acceptance of the boundaries of her life but beyond that there are layers of character - these subtle depictions are fragments of life, little windows onto a world that may have been too small for its maker.
Today, these delicate pieces offer a quiet radicalism: small, beautiful assertions of identity, longing, and expression. So too, back in the modern world; in the fragments we gather, the scraps we stitch together, and the stories we tell—art emerges.
As a subscriber to this Substack newsletter you’re among the first to know when new pieces become available - these have just launched and are available now on the Ridge & Furrow website