Our featured Artist Member for February 2025 is textile artist Michelle Holmes.
Michelle works by repurposing old fabrics, full of memories, to capture a new idea or thought or emotion in a fabric collage. She likes to explore the reflective and tactile qualities of natural fibres, silk, linen, wool and cotton. The stitching is a mixture of free machine embroidery made on a domestic sewing machine and hand stitching.
Seasons, nature, forests and wildlife. I try to take a walk each day, particularly early on or in the evening as the sun goes down. I think nature is at its best at these times. I live within what is now the National Forest in the East Midlands. These last twenty years have seen lots of planting of trees. pockets of ancient woodland are being connected. So special to see the trails left by the deer and butterflies which reside at the edge of woodland, like the Gatekeeper. Pathways for nature to begin to thrive. Some of the areas have an industrial past with pottery and mining. The forest is really being reestablished. I am interested in the history of a place too, castles, bridges and settlements, churches with ancient Saxon carvings. My love for drawing is a large part of my inspiration. I keep sketch books, drawing directly from what I see around me, These sketches are a resource, a record of memories and spark my imagination.
Gathering the fabrics and beginning to place them into backgrounds brings another layer of inspiration. It can be quite a journey to make a piece of work, I am attempting to capture something of an atmosphere with the surfaces and textures of fragments of fabric.
Favourite places by the coast also feed into the work, but again I think I am trying to embroider something of the atmosphere of the place.
I have just moved studios after 23 years. I was based in a space within a Georgian stable surrounded by other studios on a country estate so lots of wildlife and I was able to see the edge of a forest. Now I have moved to a studio housed within an old red brick Methodist Chapel in Melbourne just over the border into Derbyshire. I have a lovely window from which I can see the high street. I can walk to the most beautiful pool with swans and wild geese and pass by an ancient church with Medieval Wall paintings celebrating 900 years this year.
My studio has a large cupboard for my ever growing collection of fabrics. To stitch I need lots of light. I use a Bernina sewing machine which has a light but then have table lamps. When I am stitching I am in a little world with the sound of the sewing machine humming and focusing on the machine foot and the line I am making.
‘Dusk settles over the fields’ is my favourite moon. The background is where it began, with a piece of hand dyed vintage linen. I had actually dipped the fabric into a dark blue dye bath but something reacted with the fabric and it appeared teal green. I do enjoy working with these surprises. The contrast of the silk of a cyanotype in the foreground seems so evocative of the view as I drive to my studio. It is based upon an old map. Rose linen capturing the sun going down. Raw silk threads are hand stitched onto the moons surface.
I have been listening to Neil MacGregor’s series ‘The History of the World in a 100 objects’ from the British Museums collection…recently this has really helped me to reassess the need to make ‘Things’ which are more than useful or practical but describe some small part of the life of the person who made them. An interpretation of their world and I particularly connected with the idea of a sense of delight and appreciation of the natural world which some of these objects held. Through my work I have always felt a need to do this. Other influences include: Boro Textiles, Folk Art, carvings from church interiors, seventeenth century English embroidery, Samplers, the paintings of Mary Newcombe and Samuel Palmer, folk tales, maps, Medieval carvings.
A collection of work is available to purchase in the gallery and via our online store.
