I am exhibiting at the Kogei Craft Artists Exchange Exhibition in Kyoto in November 2026

This is a very exciting opportunity and I will be flying out to Osaka on 2nd November, returning on the 15th.

‘SYNERGY’ OF THE MOVEMENT OF THE BODY, FABRIC AND PATTERN DESIGN.

In developing this textile, I have explored motifs associated with Persian and Ottoman decorative traditions alongside Japanese pattern forms. My intention has been to create a visual conversation between these artistic cultures, using the language of pattern to explore movement, structure and cultural exchange.

As I considered my options for new work, I began looking at links in design between the textiles and ceramics of the sixteenth and seventeenth century Ottoman Empire, which I have been researching for some years, and those of Japan.

I soon realised that I needed to look much further back.

For centuries, the network of trade routes that we now call the Silk Roads connected countries and cultures across Asia and beyond. Silk, ceramics, spices and other precious goods travelled along these routes, but so did ideas, skills and designs. Patterns and motifs passed from one culture to another, changing and developing as they travelled.

I became particularly interested in the remarkable eighth-century textiles preserved at Nara in Japan. Some of these include pearl-bordered roundels, animals and hunting scenes. These designs have links stretching westwards through Tang China and Central Asia to the artistic traditions of Sasanian Persia.

I found this fascinating. A design created many hundreds of miles away could travel across countries and cultures and eventually find its way to Japan.

Of course, these designs weren’t simply copied and carried from one end of the Silk Roads to the other. As they travelled they were adapted and reinterpreted by different makers. A Persian design might be taken up in Central Asia, changed again in China and eventually appear in a different form in Japan.

I began to think of this as a design conversation taking place across the Silk Roads.

It also changed the way I looked at the Ottoman and Japanese designs that had first started my research. Instead of looking for a direct link between the two, I began looking at the much older movement of patterns and ideas between East and West.

Flowers, animals, medallions, fish-scale patterns and repeating patterns appear again and again, but each culture makes them its own.

The fish-scale pattern particularly caught my attention. It appears in many different forms across Asian decorative traditions, sometimes suggesting water or movement and sometimes simply being used as a repeating geometric pattern. It is another example of how a simple form can travel and be transformed.

This idea has become the starting point for my new work. I am interested in the ‘Travelling motif’ — a pattern that moves between cultures, changes as it travels, but still carries traces of where it has been.

For my new work for Kyoto, I have tried to bring some of these motifs together and continue that conversation in my own way.

Two weeks to go and three pieces finished and ready for the suitcase!