Our Story

                 

As a teenager growing up in a town in Cheshire, I became obsessed with cities; that was where it was all happening and that was where I was meant to be!! Spare money was spent on train fare to Manchester, Liverpool and London and hours spent in record shops, gazing longingly at club flyers ,taking photos of gig posters, famous music venues and poring over maps planning the next trip 

I  made the most of my time when I  moved to London to study Fine Art Textiles at Goldsmiths University, and just at the right time to be part of the explosion of young British contemporary artists. My chosen media was photographic silk screen printing combined with collage using elements of my many thousand photographs amassed over the teenage years. Text and music  finding their home in my work. 

On graduating ,I worked at Creative Review magazine and also developed my own work  selling prints to WH Smith and Boots and eventually  moved back to the North to train as an Art & Textiles teacher. I loved every minute of my years teaching but also enjoyed selling  my photographs hand printed on wood at art events across the country. However, my love was still for textiles so I set about finding ways to cram textile making into a teaching career and in 2020, spent half term at The Ministry of Upholstery in Manchester where I had previously completed an upholstery course. This time, I developed  small mixed media pieces  made using maps, old text and fabric digitally using photoshop to print as fabric.

In  2020  I , like many, ,had time on my hands so I plugged myself into BBC 6 music and set about creating series of artwork celebrating travel and the love of urban life ; using my extensive collection of  travel ephemera of receipts, maps, pages of travel journals to layer and explore mixed media collage. Digitally created citiscapes using my own photographs were then applied by hand to create rich layered modern landscapes blending layers of the past of a city with the present day. 

Later that year , I finally took the leap and left teaching to focus upon my own journey as an artist and developed work based on New York, Cuba, Berlin and London and Manchester. Recently , I have developed my work into a range of textile pieces:  lampshades featuring 360 degree cityscapes and cushions printed on vegan suede. Its important to me to support other small  businesses with all lampshades made in Cheshire and cushions in Manchester, a city with a rich textile history.

Click on links below to follow the Distort Design journey and keep up to date with the new prints which will be evolving.

Exhibitions:

2022- The Holy Art Gallery Dalston London

2023- Neighbourhood Gallery Sale Manchester

2024/25  Artist in Residence @  the Alan Hotel Manchester 

              Drift Gallery Nantwich Cheshire