Yvette Phillips
I’ve loved sewing since early childhood, having been taught by my grandmother, and it’s been a constant throughout my life. I specialised in printmaking for my art degree, often using a sewing machine to stitch into my work. After university I spent a decade working in the music industry, also studying for an interior design diploma during that time, which reinforced my love for textiles. On my return to Oxfordshire (with husband and children!) I resurrected my passion for sewing, embroidery, and vintage textiles.
The use of specifically vintage fabrics is central to my practice, not just for their aesthetics, but for how they connect with our lives and memories. Textiles can provoke an emotional response, and have an inherent history that makes transforming them a meaningful process that satisfies my urge to preserve these fragments of times past, but in a contemporary way. As well as recycling something that likely would have been otherwise discarded, they give a resonance and sense of a past life to my new pieces. I combine them with free-motion machine and hand embroidery to create bold collages in a rich palette of colours, patterns, and textures, provided by brocades, damasks, synthetic, and natural fibres. I also create small detailed hand embroideries on vintage fabric that capture the beauty of my subjects, most often birds and small mammals, imbuing them with life and individual character, colour combinations that sing, and a sense of atmosphere.
Yvette is happy to accept commissions.
Email: yvette@yvettephillipsart.com