Imogen Bright Moon

Imogen Bright Moon is a British Romani artist creating woven textured work she views as a ‘form of textile-language.’ Her art explores the beauty of natural fibers which she achieves by blending natural fibres through their ‘shading, tone and texture.’ She then spins the yarns and weaves without an inherent plan allowing the process to guide her work. 

Where were you born and where do you live now?

I was born in Wolverhampton in the Black Country, the (Victorian) industrial heartland of the West Midlands, UK. I’ve been lucky to have lived for extended periods in London, and also Sydney, Australia. I now live in Brighton, on the south coast of East Sussex.

What are your first memories of making with textiles?

There was always a large wooden sewing box I had access to in my childhood, and my mother’s sewing machine was installed in my bedroom when I was about ten or eleven. I was making my own patterns and clothing from the age of twelve; I made a lovely pair of wide leg summer trousers in a vintage 1950’s rose-printed cotton, and a printed cotton gown as a costume from Pride and Prejudice for my GCSE Textiles exam. I became fascinated with the 2D-3D translation between pattern, body, fabric and final form. I graduated to industrial machinery aged sixteen, having been accepted on a BTEC Fashion and Textiles course, and was able to source a second hand Brother mark II lock stitch and a flatbed overlocker so I could do my coursework at home; my parents 1940’s semi-detached dining room because my makeshift studio. These machines cost me £700 together in 1999, and wiped out my Saturday job savings; I invested in my textiles studio from the beginning because I knew it would be my future, so I’ve been fully committed to my textiles practice for at least thirty years.

You studied a BA in Fashion Design, a MA in Fashion Design + Technology and then worked for Vivienne Westwood and Hussein Chalayan. What was it about fashion that appealed?

During my final year studying BA Fashion Design, I went into a free-flow state with my pattern cutting where something really shifted for me, at this fifth-year of formal training, I was able to trust my skill set and let go of my impositions and let the fabric begin to show my how it wanted to be – move, hang, drape; to trust the process. From this module I created a project that went forward until 2009 called artdress, which was about flexibility in thought around pattern cutting, really listening and observing the nature of materials, rather than enforcing my will as a designer and wrangling the materials into some kind of submission. My final major project was a practical collection with written thesis on Madeleine Vionnet’s bias cutting, and I chose to interpret her technique in the most beautiful satin-weave fine-weight wools. It was a real learning curve and one which gave me confidence in my abilities and a deepening skill set. I was then selected as the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Costume Bursary in Ladies Costume as a new graduate, so I was fully indulged for a year in a small attic workshop in the costume cottage, creating a mixture of historical and contemporary costumes for the theatre over the road. I can’t explain what a profound experience my time at the RSC was, it was truly one of the best years of my life; the artistry, the exquisite fabrics, the consistent saying yes to the needs of the overall vision, seeing how fabrics were hand-dyed, how the lighting affected the textiles; it was being part of a transformative alchemical process with equally passionate people in-studio. When I moved to London to study for my MA, I was employed at Vivienne Westwood and Hussein Chalayan as a freelance specialist sample cutter, handling very challenging, expensive or limited-edition fabrics for the fashion week collections; high pressure and a huge team effort. It was a great honour and privilege to work with these visionaries.

When did you focus more on textiles?

I set up Bright Moon Weaving Studio In Brighton in 2016, after the birth of my second son. I had moved back from living in Bondi the previous year and knew I needed to get back into my creative work with textiles. I had studied the practical (non-clinical) elements of Arts Therapy in 2011, and this included using storytelling, poetry, mark-making, masks and puppetry and forms of communication that tuned into the hidden emotional and instinctual aspects of oneself. I created a cloth-puppet with an embroidered face of The Lady of Shalott, and the set included a simply constructed liminal-loom, just a wooden frame; it was pendulous and rhythmic, with threads and hanging lace bobbins clacking, and combined with the doll-puppet and the poem, was a visual lullaby that I found really healing and connective. I had a moment of awareness that I felt technically competent to build a full-sized loom for myself, and let the materials teach me; I had reconnected with my childhood trust in textiles and my pattern cutting and machining technical capacity. I was ready to see what would be next in this creative relationship. Between 2016-2018 I created an extensive body of handwoven textile works which I exhibited at ONCA Ecological Art Gallery in Brighton, called The Selkie : Weaving & The Wild Feminine, with an accompanying book with the folk story and analogue photographs in collaboration with Michaela Meadow, and this provided me with a new frame to explore textiles on a deeply personal, artistic level.

How do you describe your work?

In 2025, I see my work as a form of textile-language, in Romani culture it is a form of Patrin; works of tangible instinct, a love of material and alchemical processes. My newest works, The Velvets, including HIDE and The Gold-Making (of Cleopatra) are my most technically innovative and disciplined, emerging from the earlier free-flow states. These works seem to affect others quite deeply, there is a resonance emanating from them that I can’t take any credit for; I’m just the hands, the messenger.

What techniques and materials do you use?

Materially, I select fibres to blend and then hand-spin before I weave them. The blending is instinctual, done by eye, and is much like mixing paint. I consider, shading, tone, texture – will it be roughly blended, finely blended, and I use a range of naturally-coloured undyed fibres from rare breed wools, alpaca, linen, nettle, wild silks. There’s a lot of freedom in this phase, and I am very spontaneous with the results, my only parameter is that I have to blend enough for the project so I have a overall consistency on depth. This is done by weight, and it’s the only element of maths that I employ in my current studio practice and is an antidote to recovering from the hyper-specific maths of pattern cutting. I blend on a range of tools, including hand carders, English wool combs, hackles, drum carders (both manual and motorised). I spin on a selection of heritage and contemporary tools; I have a set of handmade Navajo Diné floor spindles, plus Ashford e-spinners, and the Ashford Country spinning wheel. I weave on different looms depending on the work; I have an Ashford 48” rigid-heddle loom, a vintage Dryad upright rug loom c.1936, and a handmade shaker-peg wall-mounted rag loom. My weaving techniques blend cloth weaving, rug weaving, tapestry weaving and my own innovations of the Theo Moorman technique, plus regionally specific Kurdish cultural techniques, as taught by Shorsh Saleh at The Kings Foundation School of Traditional Arts in London. Underneath all this is my innate knowledge of cloth and how it moves and behaves, so from this place I allow the works to come through free-hand. I don’t sketch or plan a design, I approach the warp with my hand-blended yarns and go from there. I then use finishing techniques to work the pieces into their final composition, namely water and gravity, as with bias cutting.

Does your culture as a Romani artist inform your work and if so how?

As textile-work is part of my family trades, it was always very present for me; my Romani great grandmother became a professional tailoress with the Burslem tailors c.1944, and she taught my mother and my aunt to sew to a professional standard as young girls in the 1940’s and 50’s, mostly by hand at that time, and I have inherited her thimble, so there was a sense of family pride and female agency in pursuing a career in textiles. Having a Romani mother, I cannot separate her teachings from her cultural ground, because I can see how it was a set of skills passed down to her, and then to me. I have been very honoured to pass my skills on to an apprentice, so I feel that culturally, I’ve held that integrity of lineage. That textiles can hold practical economic and creative freedom, whatever time period I look to, gives me a sense of belonging, both in my family culture and in the wider creative culture. More liminally, aspects of the Patrin influence my work, as a visual-cultural aspect to Romani language, it’s perceived as organic shape and symbol simultaneously, and can be read and felt.

Tell us about your Batsford book.

I had previously lectured in pattern cutting and textiles, and felt a huge responsibility to give back into the tradition of education now that I had found my own set of innovations and grounding in contemporary textiles. In 2019 I trained my apprentice, Rosemary Riedel O’Brien, and I felt that I had done my duty in ensuring the dissemination of in-studio teaching, and I’m extremely proud of her commitment to these teachings in her own practice. I have an extensive textile library, and I felt that I would want to create an apprenticeship-in-a-book with Batsford, who have an established format of educational textile books from practicing tutors and artists. My proposal was enthusiastically welcomed into their textiles commissioning department, and I was a really supported in creating the book; the creative direction, photographic vision and selecting the cover. I really wanted to fill a space in textiles education within a genre that has really suffered from the historical industrial mechanisation of each process, to the point of blocking creative flow, meaning that Wild Yarn is really an invitation to play with raw materials, from an arts therapy point of view, and see what happens. It’s my antidote to over-design and over-thinking, and it has resonated with a lot of people internationally.

Do you think highly skilled craft can be art and if you do why do you think the questions draws so much attention?

I have spent a lot of time considering this over the last few years and across various professional spaces. For myself, I have decided to articulate that I am an artist in Craft; craft as an arts-discipline with individual outcomes, craft as a technically-rich, historically-rooted foundation. If one considers an artist in oils, an artist in clay, and artist in mixed-media, in digital media etc… craft is a genre and arts disciple that I don’t want to ignore or remove from the arts practice of fine art textiles. Language is strong enough to hold multiple-positions at the same time without being in conflict. I think craft-based arts disciples such as textiles (specifically) suffer from historical associations with over-familiarity (we encounter textiles multiple times daily and primarily in domestic contexts), the unconscious reflex to seek practical application (textile = blanket, clothing etc…), female economic and creative emancipation, colonial industrialisation and child labour, prison labour, mother issues. Where my arts therapy training really helps is detangling what issues are true for me now, which belong to the historical contexts of textiles, which issues I have over-identified with or have unresolved feelings about, and then the ancient muse of textiles Herself, what is she asking of me, how do I sit at the loom as a contemporary weaver and stay true to the freedom within artistic disposition, holding it all together.

What is your proudest career moment so far?

That’s a hard one to answer, I’ve been very lucky to have had many proud moments. I think I can narrow it down to a few; participating with Antony Gormley in his One & Other artwork on The Fourth Plinth in my artdress textiles; making the “moon” costume for Florence Welch in her music video “You Got The Love”; having Wild Yarn published by Batsford.

Do you have any advice for aspiring textile artists?

I think that having the tenacity to get stuck-in, commit and be in relationship. Learn the technical specifics, practice, explore, and then once you feel a personal level of technical comfort, really be with the materials, what do they need, let them inform you. Textile art can mean the material is textile, it has a quality of handling and can be of natural or hyper-tech composition, what’s your material process? How to you go from raw stuff to something you enjoy handling, what’s the spectrum? Then there’s textile art as a recognisable construction method; woven, felted, knotted, knitted. The moment into artistic voice is how you relate to and innovate with the material and the method to create your work. Remain teachable to those two things.

https://www.batsfordbooks.com/book/wild-yarn/