The simple version

I love making textiles and encouraging other people to make them too.

The social media version

I weave, spin, make felt, stitch, dye, play. I’m curious, creative, capable, changeable. Wales is becoming my home.

The short version

I’m from Cumbria but now I live in Wales, on the western coast of Ceredigion. For ten years my home was the beautiful Isle of Tiree in the Inner Hebrides, off the west coast of Scotland.

I think about the quiet discipline of cloth: habits and quotidian rhythms and the structure of praying the hours; how our outworn clothes embody our history and memory; about what we keep and what we waste, and about connections and inclusion and mixing things up.

I focus on fibre – weave, spin, felt, knit – combined with surface design and stitch. I weave with my handspun yarns and hand dyed fabric, endless play with colours and textures. I’m exploring the ways in which fibre and fabric can connect with and complement each other. The warmth of wool and the lustre of silk, the play of colour, the rhythms of the day and the enchantments of cloth – these are the elements that lead me to create. My most used words – experiment, inspire…

The slow version

I work with textile materials, exploring the interplay of fibre and cloth, colours, textures, the significance of garments, mending and joining, what can be included, how it holds together, the beautiful potential of mistakes, flaws, uncertainty.

I’m especially interested in using local fleece and outworn clothing with conventionally precious fibres like silk. I spin, weave, make felt, knit and stitch, often in combination. I’m interested in dyeing, printing and resist techniques. Much of my work is fragmentary. I take photographs, sometimes sketch, more often work from a starting point of words, or a fleeting idea, expressing it directly through working with fabrics, yarns and fibres.

Things I think about a lot:

  • Myth, legend, fairytale and folklore, archetypes, mysteries, poetry and symbols, the magical everyday.
  • Fragile connections, shame, vulnerability and perceived inability, fragmentation, exclusion and inclusion, loss of memory, transience. Both as they frame my inner space and as they fracture community. I’m interested in what stops things falling apart, and in the ways beauty and imperfection interact.
  • Seed and fruit, ripening, fertility, nurture and rootedness.
  • The Japanese concepts and traditions of Saori, wabi sabi, kintsugi, boro and sakiori
  • The power of cloth to mantle, enchantment, invisibility and visibility, layers
  • The importance of idealism and wonder, redemption and grace. Brigid/Ffraed, Hestia, Elen, Mary the blessed mother and the Black Madonna.
  • The rhythms of prayer and liturgy, quotidian detail, habit as practice and covering, what we wear and what we wear out, the patterns we create and the marks we leave behind, the sacred mundane
  • Margins, edges, intersections, the borderlands between art and craft, clarity and confusion, word and flesh, strength and weakness, precious and mundane, sure and doubtful; hedgerows, waysides, places that join and divide, thin places.
  • Textiles as both manifestation and metaphor of hospitality and ideas of home, domesticity, routines and rituals, laundry, kitchen cloth, aelwyd, the hearth
  • Bowls, cups, shells, bags, pockets, what they hold, what they hide. Amulets, talismans, tokens, charms, ‘unintentional vessels’ (Elise Kova)
  • Ancient textiles, archaeology, unearthing
  • Slow making, refashioning, minimalism and maximalism, the ways people interact with their places, cynefin, habitat, what we belong to, what belongs to us
  • The imagery of words, etymologies, silence and space
  • Fragments and small things, shards, scatteredness, gatheredness

I see creation almost as a sacramental act, and I strongly believe in making creativity accessible to ordinary people in their everyday lives.

I grew up in Cumbria and have lived there a number of times since. I have an English Literature degree but regarding textiles I’m mostly self taught, which really means I’ve learned from many other artists through friendships, books, magazines, groups and the generous internet. In 2008 I moved to the beautiful and fragile Isle of Tiree off the west coast of Scotland, and in 2010 I completed the Open College of the Arts Textiles 1 course. In 2018 I moved to Cymru (Wales) and started to learn Cymraeg. It’s an ending for ‘art textiles from the Isle of Tiree’ as the focus of my work, but a new beginning also, and who knows where this journey will lead?

Contact me at fiona.dix[at]lovefibre.com.