Jamie is a multidisciplinary artist and creative whose practice moves between textiles, photography, objects and installation. With a background spanning graphic design, art direction and visual culture, she brings a longstanding curiosity about materials, technique and the ways things are made.
That curiosity has deep roots. Her mother and grandmother were knitters, sewers and makers, her father an engineer and woodworker. She inherited a healthy respect for both craftsmanship and problem-solving. Resourcefulness was religion. Things were repaired, repurposed and made by hand whenever possible.
An extensive commercial practice in creative industries has infused an intimate understanding of how materials are selected, produced, packaged and ultimately discarded, and has fed her own studio practice with new perspectives, materials and ideas.
Her current work carries those instincts into an ongoing exploration of discarded and overlooked materials. Everyday remnants are collected, dissected and reassembled through slow, repetitive methods of braiding, knotting, wrapping and weaving. Materials that were designed to be temporary or insignificant are given time and attention, allowing their physical qualities, histories and possibilities to emerge. The resulting works exist somewhere between textile, sculpture and installation and often cumulative and open-ended, changing according to the materials at hand, the process of making and the spaces they inhabit.
The work is tactile, intuitive and deliberately human, with tools and techniques chosen to leave room for irregularity and the character of the material to remain visible. Alongside the ongoing material project, lino cutting and block printing, collage, plaster work and handmade inks can occupy any given day, with one process often leading unexpectedly to another.
The thinking behind her work considers the space between usefulness and waste, industry and handwork, intention and accident, while finding new forms through the physical process of making.
