Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau has been my favourite style of art as long as I can remember; it’s the first bit of art history I truly fell in love with. It honours nature’s complexity and is made to look as if it grew. Something magical in a world that’s trying to have as many straight lines as possible; it loves colour and pattern and asymmetry but above all Art Nouveau loves woman.

The Sagrada Família has been such a massive part of how I see art for so long; it’s a cathedral made to honour nature. Over the years I’ve been watching myself develop art and seeing how what I love echoes into what I make. I made a small cathedral to rest (a crochet tent) last year and it inspired me to begin stain glass. I’ve been Slowly watching myself recreate so much of the Art Nouveau I loved growing up but using traditionally feminine forms of making; textiles.

I do think its funny that something so inherently feminine was still so dominated by men, and so it feels only fit I revisited the era myself but as a woman within materials that have thousands of years of history in the hands of woman.

I used to paint because that’s what ‘great artists do’ but I think as I have deconstructed my own internalized Misogyny and kind of classist hierarchies of making I find myself connecting with woman’s art and art made to honour nature and woman. I’m moving towards a new era and mode of making, mildly but not fully away from textiles but would never have gotten here without the yarns I’ve spent the last 8 years being kept warm with.