Elizabeth Loveday

Artist, Elizabeth Loveday joins us to tutor our 3-day short course, Contemporary Textile Portraits.

My name is Elizabeth Loveday, I am an artist, mother and storyteller from Cornwall. I come from a family of creative craftswomen who have all used alternative materials in the arts to create narrative works. My mother is a maker of wooden automata, and my grandmother was a ceramicist. They both used their work to tell stories and escape the humdrum with humour and a touch of the absurd, and in this, our work feels linked. 

My methods do not sit solely within the traditional notion of “fine art”, but draw elements from illustration, textiles and craft. Using my linear drawings as a guide, I use fabric of different weights, textures and ages, hand dying, layering and hand stitching to create narrative and decorative works. I use both traditional and gestural embroidery, using threads as accents, highlights and shadows, defining and mark-making sections of my images. 

I then purposefully bruise, unstitch and weather my work, teasing the weaves to blend the contrast between fabrics. I like to use fabrics of contextual significance; fabric is a powerful and very human medium, it can evoke memory and feeling with ease, as we spend our lives draped in it, sleeping in it, peacocking in it, and so on, and this can strengthen and give great weight to a narrative. 

I view my work as a visual outlet for dialogues that exist within myself and wider society. Handling humanistic themes, I use characters loosely gleaned from Cornish folk tales and my own life to tell stories that exist within the community I live in right now. It is at once a comment on self and place and the intermingling of both…