On a fresh autumn morning in 1992, I walked up the stairs of
London’s Central Saint Martins School of Art on Charing
Cross Road and into the textile studio. It was the beginning
of my first year and on that day we started the colour course
taught by the painter Garth Lewis. Structured closely around
the Bauhaus colour theory course taught over 70 years
earlier by Johannes Itten, Paul Klee and Josef Albers, it
became the corner stone of almost everything I would create
afterwards as an artist. One day a week for the following
year I hand painted in gouache, creating thousands of small
squares by mixing and adding colour as I went – collating a slow, internal library of understanding about how colour interacts and shifts through hue, chroma, and saturation. At that time there was almost no pre-dyed thread available in the textile department; if you wanted to use colour in your work, you had to dye it yourself. As my life as a professional weaver took shape over the next five years, I realized that colour and dyeing was going to be an intrinsic part of my life. I had been told rather bluntly the previous year — in my art foundation course – that I was a ‘terrible painter; but a girl and good with colour.’ By consequence I was encouraged to study textile design, rather than fine art. It was a crushing blow at the time, but unexpectedly advantageous in the long run.
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