I am concerned with developing an expressive urgency to reflect my inner landscape. I am interested in visible seams as drawn lines, the excitement of tangible colour you get from fabric and the endless pictorial possibilities with layering and embellishing using paint, threads or pen and ink.

Sometimes an idea seems meant to be expressed on paper, sometimes fabric and thread dominate my response. I work the abundance of materials available around each new idea. Through drawing I work out which approach gets the idea across. I am idea-driven. I build each quilt in an instinctive, painterly way, composing and obliterating as I go along, allowing some pictorial surprises to work for me. Others get chopped and re-worked. Sketchbooks are part of my process often, helping me work out what I am NOT saying! Sometimes, I use poetry as a starting point. I work standing up at an easel . It is colour that gets me out of bed in the morning and for inspiration I turn to Amish quilts, Howard Hodgkin, Winifred Nicholson, the Gees Bend quilts and German Expressionists like Emile Nölde and Kirchner. For encouragement on the narrative front, I turn to Chagall, Rembrandt and Van Gogh. I have recently discovered the animation work of the Quay Brothers and my fascination with toys continues to grow.

I stitch and paint in a layered way, mapping-out my world, the part I see and the part I can only feel. Being an artist eases my confusion! I delight in visual language that draws you into a suggestion of depth AND provides flatter, more abstract areas in which to rest your eye or take on new thoughts. Most of my thoughts and feelings are rough edged, so I see little need to always work within a rectangle or square.

Various domestic and spiritual concerns feed the landscape of my heart. I have been stirred up by my daughter's drawings, her exactitude of thought, her exuberance and spiritual directness. I have learnt much from her pictures. Sometimes, it seems, some of my pieces become prayers. My dialogue with Christ is in words and pictures. I am trying to develop concise, economical and instinctive responses in both areas! With a sense of urgent expression at heart, it might seem strange that the language of stitch and fabric should feel so personally relevant but I find that the length of time required to create that illusion of fresh expression gives me space for listening and understanding where I am going.

My artwork has helped me to process both upheaval and joy. The upheaval of adopting our daughter combined with watching the transforming power of love in her life has been a huge pre-occupation. In many senses our emotional maps have become entwined. I have become involved with her interests, hence the imagery of mermaids and dinosaur eggs!

Watercolours are the paints that I like best. I let feeling flow through working wet on wet, letting colours bleed into one another. I agree with Eric Ravillious who said that working in oils was like painting in toothpaste!

I draw with paint, as with anything else, always trying to balance the objective approach with expression.

After a traditional drawing education at Camberwell Art School , I spent three years at Goldsmiths, where I was taught to think and develop my artistic voice. I hovered as a student between paint and sculpture, with a love of textiles firmly rooted in me at a young age by my grandmother, who taught me to patchwork. An early conviction that Mark Rothco learnt all his tricks from Amish quilts, helped me see that my passions were jogging towards textiles . For ten years I painted oils and watercolours, brewing ways of incorporating my patchwork passion with paint. I began to combine paint and stitch in 1996. What a shame it is, that the art establishment view pickled Sharks more fondly than textiles !

My quilted pieces contain varying degrees of function. Like my watercolours on paper, they are unwashable! I believe that as quilters it is not just domestic urgency that should be concerning us but expressive urgency too. We need to find the voice and language pertinent to ourselves and our era. The domestic/functional voice is surely at its most potent now as echo or memory, threaded amongst an imaginative and intuitive response.

I hope you enjoy my work!

© Kate Green