Rosalind Stoddart Northamptonshire, United Kingdom
Rosalind Stoddart is a sustainable fine art textile artist who uses materials grown and foraged from her immediate surroundings including natural dyes, alpaca fleece, and flax. Her work serves as a way to raise awareness about the pressing environmental issues and she has exhibited in the UK, Brazil, Sweden and Venice.
I am an artist who uses textile materials sourced from my immediate environment, including alpaca fleece, flax, foraged and hand-grown organic materials. My work often serves as a way to engage with and raise awareness about pressing environmental issues. A distinctive feature of my art is the beautiful use of colour, achieved through producing my own natural plant dyes. By incorporating a variety of hand weaving techniques, felting, stitching and more, I primarily focus on creating wall pieces that frequently convey an environmental message. Artist Sonia Delaunay is one of my inspirations, not only because of her joyous sense of colour, but also because of our shared path from painting to textiles.
I am consistently mindful of minimizing my environmental impact in both my lifestyle and artistic practice, while creating poetic responses to lived experiences and natural cycles. My practice is characterized by its slow and intuitive nature, reflecting my belief in art as a form of stewardship.
Working ‘from field to studio’, connects me deeply to my immediate environment and helps give my practice a sustainable approach. My work is usually refined down to what might appear at first glance simple, but comes from a deep process of observing, questioning and engaging in things that fascinate me – the natural world and certain man-made things such as the bold sculptural and simple shapes of Romanesque architecture and artists like Ben Nicholson and Ellsworth Kelly. It is also my way of finding calm and meaning in this complex world.
