Sally Light (aka Bodkin Beak) United Kingdom

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I'm a textile artist/writer with an employment history of working in the textile trades, for whom cloth has to be the natural substrate for my texts and photographic images. My themes are to do with communicating care for our environment through noticing it, and demonstrating how the knowledge and language of the hands is not yet lost.

My practise is rooted in my employment experience of working in the textile trades. I use fabric digitally printed with my photographs and texts, to make both useful objects and wall hung art: from buttons, button spool books and needle cases, to banners. Because of my own long experience of earning my living through working with my hands, I have been fascinated to learn the social histories tied up with other people’s work. I want my own artwork to reflect upon, and communicate these personal experiences of manual labour. I believe profoundly that tactile or haptic engagement with objects and tools, has the capacity to touch people’s emotions and promote thinking, and feel that in this digital age, the decreasing intimacy with the tactility of materials and tools: the pressing of buttons rather than the doing up of buttons, the use of a key pad instead of the inscribing of ink onto paper, leads to people feeling disconnected and distanced from their selves and each other. In short our feelings become less embodied.

With my work I aim to demonstrate how people can find their place within the natural landscape, through using their own vocabulary and styles of expression, to explore their relationship with it. We all frame new knowledge within existing the maps of knowledge we already have. I hope to illustrate that the language of our hands (and the language relating to textile work in particular) can still in our times, be richly expressive of all sorts of experiences. When I studied for a degree in Creative Writing as a mature student, I was struck by how often contemporary poetry employs imagery that is predominantly tactile in nature. I believe this use of tactile rather than visual imagery, responds to a general thirst for embodied experience; an understanding of, and sensitivity to the world, that is to be gained through using the hands, and which is fast becoming lost or sidelined, in our digital age.

I feel drawn to make physically small works. This is in part due to economics and a wish to live in an environmentally sustainable way. I live in a tiny house, I have travelled small distances, rather than to far flung places. I identify with my working class antecedents and those who have followed similar trades. I live in a cottage whose previous occupants 150 years ago followed the same trade (mending and burling in a woollen mill) as I have. Through financial necessity also, I find my inspiration in the everyday and the local. But then again, this is my personal predilection. I want my art to relate and inspire inhabitants of my own local community, to cast light on, and celebrate the features of a place I share with others, because I believe art can help forge relationship, with each other and our past, and with our local environment.