Sarah McAlister Greater London, United Kingdom
Sarah McAlister has just finished studying MA Textiles at The University for the Creative Arts and focuses her practice on re-using found materials. Her work is made in response to places and events she has experienced. Her ethos as a textile artist is to recycle, re-use and re-purpose existing resources meaning that her pieces are made entirely from found objects and fabrics.
I love all kinds of textiles and exploring and experimenting with how they work together and alone. I am a thoughtful and intuitive artist who loves creating sustainable textile work that tells a story. The overriding challenge for me is to use found materials in a suitable and appropriate way to make a new, beautiful and meaningful piece. Each new creation will take on different forms depending on the materials available.
My practice has extended themes of place, exclusion and obsolescence, developing different motifs into textile installation pieces. My style is to keep things simple in a desire to understand an ever increasingly complicated world.
I am a mixed media artist and explore different techniques according to the found materials available and the effect I wish to achieve. One technique I use is bobbin lace making. I make lace that challenges convention. What I love about lace is that what is missing is as important as what is there.
I finished my MA Textiles (at University for the Creative Arts) in September 2024 and I am now working as an occasional creative workshop tutor. In my studies, I had the freedom to be able to research the questions that really interest me: how textiles resonate with the place or time they were made or used and especially how to see the new potential uses for an old discarded material.
My practice is also crossing boundaries by stitching together repurposed textile and other fabrics in combinations that represent solid real-life metal structures.
Artwork
Gas Holder, repurposed textile, 2024
Pylon 2, copper wire extracted from discarded electrical cable, 2024
Pylon 1, repurposed copper wire extracted from discarded electric cable, 2023
Chatter (Bletchley Park ), Textile, 2023
Bike Chain, Sublimation printed found fabric, 2023
Turn to the light, Wire, thread, glass, 2023
Woven Sampler, mixed textiles, 2021
memories, mixed media, 2022
Postcards, screen print on fabric, 2022
Balustrade, 2021
Townscape 2, 2021
Townscape 1, Sublimation print on textile, 2021
Little House, monoprint acrylic on paper and collage, 2021
Sampler 2, textile, 2021
Sampler, Textile, 2021
Coming Home, textile, 2022
Money and Power, wire, electric cable, coins, 2022
Silver Birch (series of individual pieces), textile, 2024, various
The Point, Textile, 2024