Award-winning textile artist Heather Collins is showing her latest piece in the Deep Time exhibition at Hastings Museum. Inspired by fossils shown in the museum, her textile ammonite is created from handmade fabric, free machine embroidery, mixed media and hand stitching and, like all of her work, is defined by its incredible attention to colour, texture and realism.
“I am inspired by the natural landscapes around Rye,” she explained. “I’m drawn to decay; the colours, shapes and movement of things returning to their component parts fascinates me.”
Heather, who is a member of the Sussex Guild has been well known as a free embroidery artist for the last twenty years. Her work has been shown in the Rye Society of Artists summer show, at the Rye Art Gallery, in exhibitions around the world and can be seen in permanent museum collections. “I decided to enter a miniature 3D piece, Compost Heap, in the 2005 V111 Triennale Internationale des mini-textiles at the Musee Angers in France,” she recalled. “The exhibition toured the world for three years and I was thrilled when the museum bought the piece for their own collection in 2009. It was a real honour.”
In 2006 her miniature, Winter Bramble, won the Mantero Prize at Arte & Arte Miniart Textil Como, in Italy. Since then, Heather’s work has regularly been selected for international exhibitions including the 2016 and 2017 Scythia International biennial of Contemporary Textile Art in Ukraine and 2019 Libres comme L’Art! in France. Her work will be featuring later this year in the Musee Angers’ 2025 Weaving the Future exhibition.
Each piece requires enormous commitment and some, such as her life-sized anchor or beach groynes, inspired by Rye Harbour Nature Reserve, take months to create. “I start with a few strands of thread or wool,” she explained. “I then stitch each of them together by hand or with a machine. I add more fibres and tiny pieces of cloth to create a large piece of hand made fabric. I’m not precious about my work, I’ll chop it up numerous times and distress it with a soldering iron to achieve the desired texture and colour.” Once she has a large enough piece of base fabric she stretches it over a mixed media frame of chicken wire, wrapped in muslin and dipped in a weak solution of PVA glue. The final work is shaped and embellished with beading, knot work and hand stitching.
Creating the leaves and flowers that cover her woodland pieces requires a different technique. “I apply tiny snippets of fusible fabric to a background,” Heather explained. “I then cover these with thread, more fabric and wool to get the right colour and then I cover the whole surface with a sheer fabric before applying parchment paper and a hot iron to fuse all the layers together.” Heather uses an embroidery hoop to apply free machine detailing and each leaf, bracket fungus, or berry is wired individually so each one can be styled into place. On her forest pieces she may create 50 to 100 leaves with even more on the larger works.
These life-sized pieces are all the more remarkable given that Heather creates work in spite of a disability. Limited strength in her left hand means she can only produce a few pieces a year, working in bursts of 20 minutes at a time. “Because of the problem with my hand I use free machine embroidery as my main medium,” she said. “I use a knee lift, tilt table and chair with arm rests to support my left arm. I wouldn’t be able to work without these aids.”
Despite the fact that her disabilities make an impact on how long she can work, Heather continues to create and to show her work to great acclaim. “I was lucky to have found embroidery later in life,” she said. “I would have liked to continue with my studies, taught and passed on my knowledge but I have to accept the limits imposed by my disabilities have prevented that. However, the journey I have been on with fabric and thread has been amazing, especially the accolades I have won from other countries and artists. To have achieved what I have, in 20 years has been beyond my wildest dreams.”
To see more of Heather’s work visit www.heathercollins.co.uk.
Image Credits: Peter Greenhalf .