the Loom

Artist’s Statement:

These braided-ink pieces have been my devoted study over the past year. They allow me to slip into what I can only describe as my most sacred head and heart space.

In my release of Awen, I wrote that each line painted was a breath out, an intention laid, a spell cast… and each time I’ve returned to my desk, laying lines down on paper, the same has remained true.

When I looked down at this completed painting, the Loom, I knew the energy had shifted from that of the Awen series. Over the months, the colours I’d been luxuriating in had slowly and purposefully graduated from enveloping indigo, to a deep iris purple, to a nourishing earthy brown - settling at last into what felt wholly resonant: a sanguine, life-enforcing burgundy red. Vital, heartening, embodied. And with the change in the lines’ colours came a shift in perspective and a new understanding of what these paintings truly are to me.

As many of you know, I work across mediums and practices. Textiles like wool, silk, and linen offer me another form of creative fire when I have time to sit with them. And as with any medium I engage with, I’ve spent countless days and nights exploring the histories, rituals, and meanings being their making.

Folkloric tales across cultures speak of women-folk spinning or weaving a person’s destiny into thread or yarn - an act of shaping fate through fiber.

You can see echoes of this in Celtic knotwork, where lines have no known beginning or end, circling unto themselves endlessly to represent eternity, love, and interconnectedness (handfasting is a beautiful manifestation of this idea). You can also look to those who practice well-wishing when touching or braiding hair, or those who knit heirlooms in anticipation of new life.

It is all connected: these beliefs, stories, and practices. Human beings have been casting their own quiet spells into the threads of their loved ones’ lives - weaving intention into the everyday - for millennia.

the Loom symbolizes all of this for me. Bending boundaries between mediums, I’ve treated each line of impassioned burgundy ink as its own thread, weaving them all together into a tapestry imbued with wishes. It is a crimson path leading one deeper into the landscape of their own heart. A scarlet braid, connecting us to one another in warmth. A burgundy knot—love unending.

the Loom is a tangible wish, from me, to you and your loved ones.

xx,

W