About me
Why me, why now? Why not?
Much of this will be a familiar story. A lifetime of making and unmaking, stitching and unpicking, creating, editing and reworking. The need to make is firmly stitched into my fabric. In between all the making, I’ve spent my professional life connecting others with the arts, creative and cultural activity, manging programmes of arts activity and researching arts and cultural engagement.
I’ve been incubating my thoughts on quilting since 2020 so Cloud Quilting is also, at least in part, a pandemic-inspired response to achieving that (illusive) better work/life balance that brings together my research interests with creative practice and some flexibility for all things family.
The main 'hat' I wear is in higher education (knowledge exchange and impact) supporting a fabulous team. Part of this role in recent years has involved working with an inspiring group of colleagues working to improve data literacy for young people - to help them prepare for a world of work in which data will play a large part.
My interest in designing with data comes from this work though my research background lies in participatory arts engagement, digital cultural heritage and transformative learning.
The first quilts I made were for my daughters. I wanted the designs to represent me somehow so I spent a long (long) time picking the quilt pattern and fabrics. This experience got me thinking about how (and where) meaning is invested in quilt making, in the pattern and fabric choices as well as the invisible meanings stitched into the quilt at a particular point in time (or in life). In other words, while I was making my first quilts I was already thinking about quilt pattern design.
Cloud Quilting is my way of bringing together my research interests in arts practice and my interest in data visualisation to design quilts in new ways.
My Creative Informatics project (see link below) is allowing me to take this further by thinking about personalised datadriven quilt design and the implications for what I'm calling quilting futures.
Creative Informatics update 1 (October 2022)
About Quiltbot - my Creative Informatics project (July 2023)