“An artist who shares a little of themselves – their passion, inspiration and knowledge – to create a piece of handmade work, which has an authenticity, ‘a soul’, is immeasurable.”
Amanda Cobbett is an award-winning textile artist with over 30 years’ experience.
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She trained as a printed textile designer at Chelsea College of Art (UAL), and went on to work as a fashion print designer.
A move to the country and a gift of an old Bernina sewing machine enabled Amanda to finally realise her dream – to work from home as a professional artist, and to return to the art of making, and a more meaningful approach to the medium of textiles.
Her artistic talent is embedded in her DNA – her passion for textiles developed at an early age whilst watching her grandmothers, both gifted seamstresses. Her grandfather, a talented engineer, also played a part – his ability to visualise in three dimensions, and to deftly turn a sketch into an object, is a skill that Amanda has inherited, and which is manifest in her work today. These attributes, together with her love of mark-making, are the basis from which each piece of work is created.
Her twice-daily walk in the surrounding forest with her dog, is dubbed her ‘daily commute’ and is where she found the perfect subject matter to replicate. In this peaceful environment, away from the hubbub of organising a busy home and family, she finds her inspiration and precious time for working through ideas and problems. As she walks, she scours the understorey of the forest floor seeking its hidden treasures. Over time, she has honed an inherent ability to locate intriguing flora in the most unexpected of places. Her three-dimensional, papier-mâché and machine-embroidered sculptures are then created in her studio in the Surrey Hills.
Amanda’s three-dimensional embroidered sculptures appear to float in their perspex cases and have the feeling of having just being collected from the forest for display – very much a modern version of a Victorian plant hunter’s specimen case. “I like to think that my pieces could trick the eye into thinking that what you are seeing might be real. I am also passionate about highlighting and preserving specimens from the forest that could, without care, become red-listed. If we are not aware that they exist, how will we know when they have disappeared? By creating an embroidered sculpture of a natural object and displaying it in a case in a gallery, it brings our natural world into another dimension – we then might look for that specimen in nature, and care about its existence.”
Amanda often grid references her original finds and offers that information with the embroidered artwork, giving it further authenticity. Her ‘slow textile’ process has garnered interest from scientists, conservationists, art collectors and textile enthusiasts alike.
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