Millie Collins (she/her)
I am a textile maker, researcher and designer guided by process and tactile methods of making. Materials and moments steer my practice allowing responsive explorations of colour, texture and composition to emerge through cloth. Using embroidery techniques, I aim to alter the landscape of a fabric – shifting surfaces to become visually and physically engaging. My work considers material interactions – how fabric qualities behave in relation to one another and how this reflects internal and external worlds. This body of work explores textile traces looking at the way materials maintain memory and coerce with environments, bodies and place.
Settling Traces
Textiles offer a sense of place – they live lives and tell stories. This work explores the movement of textiles – the way material items migrate, adapt and reflect their surroundings. The pieces embody textiles’ capacity to ground. Using meditative and tactile embroidery techniques, I have investigated how a textile can hold you within a place visually and physically, relating to the senses and engaging with the body’s emotional states.
Concerned with material lives, the collection is comprised of textile fragments – focusing on fabric histories, futures and the ethics surrounding textile production and disposal. I have adopted forgotten, found and donated textiles to instil new narratives within cloth. Working with lightweight and translucent materials, the fabrics shift with the environments they are placed within.
The textiles offer points for settlement. Capturing the ways materials can hold, carry and rest my research explores the portability of textiles in transit. These pieces reflect and follow the position of cloth throughout the movements of everyday existence whilst offering a grounding space for stillness.
