British textile artist and interior designer Susie Koren lives in East Sussex. She paints on cloth and uses hand stitching to draw lines in a muted palette of earth pigments. 

What is your background in textiles?

My textile journey evolved over many decades.  I have always been a maker and gravitated towards textiles from an early age, making dolls clothes and hexagon patches with my maternal grandmother’s scraps.  My mother has never been without an embroidery project and tried to teach me but I struggled with the precision and patience required and gave up. Later my Norwegian mother-in-law’s work woke me up to textiles.  She trained as a painter in Paris and then began making large textile artworks from the early 1960s, breaking all ‘the rules’, creating expressive stitches that were not in any embroidery book. Her work gave me the freedom to explore textiles as a medium without worrying about conforming!

After leaving school I worked as a secretary yet realised I needed to do something creative.  I had a good eye for colour and design so I enrolled on an Interior Design course at Chelsea School of Art.  Over my career I have had the luxury of handling the most beautiful furnishing fabrics.

With a mid career break to raise our children I took the opportunity to learn to sew “properly’ and whilst studying City and Guilds Patchwork & Quilting I was introduced to art quilts.   Returning to my interior design career I also began to explore surface design techniques and processes at the Committed to Cloth teaching studio run by Claire Benn and Leslie Morgan.  I embraced wet & wild the introductory course and over several years pushed the boundaries of various techniques until I found my own visual language; master classes followed as I pursued my studio practice.   For years now studio days are inked in the diary and life juggled around them. 

What is it that appeals to you about textiles as a medium and what techniques do you use?

I love the tactile feel of vintage linen and hemp and that each scrap has it’s own woven story.  I paint on cloth using earth pigments in a soya milk binder building up layers, blending the colours together using mono printing and home made carborundum plates that result in a wonderful depth of colour and subtle field of marks.   Hand stitching is an integral part of my work.  I love the quiet slowness of the stitching, the meditative repetition as the needle goes up and down through the cloth. 

How do you describe your work?

I paint on cloth using the muted palette of earth pigments and hand stitched drawn lines. 

Why are you drawn to muted colours?

Land sea and sky are my inspiration; capturing the neutral palette of bleak winter landscapes, bare branches, colours of the earth, rocks, lichen, shells, the emptiness of stormy windswept beaches, chalk cliffs, the repetitive rhythms and colours of nature.   

Do you have your own studio? 

I live on Ashdown Forest in East Sussex. In 2016 with the prize money from winning The Fine Art Quilt Masters and three busy years with interior design projects I had the money to build a studio and move from an 80 x 150cm table in my office to 3m x 5m insulated shed in the garden.  It was a big commitment but worth every penny, having a quiet dedicated space where I can leave work out is amazing!

How do you work? 

I have an inspiration corner of ‘treasures’ collected whilst out walking.   I take photographs and always carry a pocket size sketchbook. The walking is an important part of my creative process; it stills my mind and connects me to the landscape.  Back in the studio the sketchbook along with the photographs function as reminder of the colours, textures and sounds of a particularly time and place.   In the studio I have an A4 workbook that has sketches of ideas, annotated working drawings, notes to clarify the process of construction and materials that are used with bits of fabric and stitch samples stuck in, these are not neat books.  I also make process led samples experimenting with various techniques as helpful reference for more considered work.

Please tell us a little bit about the Sketchbook Project and why you took part.

The Sketchbook Project is one of the largest collections of sketchbooks in the world located at the Brooklyn Library in New York and home to over 40,000 international sketchbooks made by children to professional artists.   I contributed my first Sketchbook in 2012 that marked the end of the ‘Lines and Text’ series.  That year the Sketchbook Project toured to Edwardsville, Illinois and consequently I was invited to make another Sketchbook for an exhibition at Arts Centre there. I enjoy making the books and my 2018 Sketchbook Project submission was an exploration of new stitch ideas. I actually loved this book so much I had to make a copy for the Project!  

How has your work evolved over your career?

With my early work ‘Lines and Text’ made using the batik technique I was influenced by Eastern spiritual readings.  I was looking for balance, black and white, positive and negative and was visually drawn to the hexagram lines from the I Ching.  The tiny tjanting tool I drew the repetitive wax lines with felt familiar, like a Rotring pen. As the work developed, the lines became less intense I introduced text and then contour lines that represented landscape. This coincided with starting to use earth pigments and my work became freer and painterly. I am interested in edges, capturing the blurred lines between land, sea & sky. 

How long does one piece generally take from start to finish?

This is a difficult question.  Sometimes the painted fabric sits on my workroom wall for several weeks waiting for the next decision and often I am finishing off stitching one piece while beginning another; on average a couple of months.

What is your career highlight to date?

It has got to be the excitement and honour of having two pieces of work selected for the Summer Exhibition in 2016 and the thrill of seeing them hanging at the Royal Academy of Art. Winning the Fine Art Quilt Masters was an equal highlight and felt like a big validation of my new pigment work.

What advice can give to aspiring textile artists?

Keep working, it takes time and commitment to develop the work you want to do. You don’t need to know how to do something before you start so don’t be afraid to experiment and make mistakes you will always have learnt something.

www.susiekoren.com