Anna Avery

My practice centres on drawing with stitch to produce ambiguous compositions that explore concepts of the figure, shifting topographies, and landscape. 

Taking elements from the figurative, abstract, and decorative traditions within painting, I use these codes in experimental ways to make work on the expanded boundary between painting, textiles, and sculpture. My approach can be distilled as sewing ‘stitches to swatches to swathes’ to produce works of varying scales that celebrate the material process of making which is secured, temporally, through the sewn line. Interested in the substantial heft of fabric, I emphasise the literal ‘material’ of the work itself – the fabrics intervene in space through rippled, wrinkled, and warped surfaces activated by the tension of thread.

Time spent in Devon (where I was born), the edgeland of Dungeness, the idyll of Iona, and the mixed natural and urban environment in Edinburgh all influence my work concerned with a felt sense of place. I draw from these sites, as well as spaces imagined, dreamt, or half-remembered to make work with a broader understanding of landscape as something both external and internal. This exploration is undergirded by a focus on sustainability: I gather fabric and thread from second-hand, scrap, and discarded resources which often produce offbeat variations in the embroidered surfaces as I run out of a particular vintage thread and find ‘new’ ones to replace it.