Sarah McAlister Greater London, United Kingdom

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Sarah McAlister is currently studying MA Textiles at The University for the Creative Arts and focuses her practice on re-using found materials. Her ethos as a textile artist is to recycle, re-use and re-purpose existing resources. 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 finish my MA Textiles (at University for the Creative Arts) in September 2024. In my studies so far, I have 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

The Point, Textile, 2024

Sarah McAlister Greater London, United Kingdom Back to profiles Invite to apply

Artwork

Sarah McAlister Greater London, United Kingdom

Back to profiles