About Me

Textile Art by Naomi Renouf

Layered textiles, machine embroidery and appliqué.

About Me and My Work

Although originally a painter, I have worked with a variety of media over the years. I have always loved the tactile qualities of working with textiles and sometimes work with them alone but at other times I combine them with other media.

Five years ago I started making my own paper and for a couple of years I was mostly using hand-made paper which I painted with acrylic and then applied textiles and other media. Although I still sometimes work on paper, at the moment I am mostly working solely with textiles.

I sometimes use small pieces of fabric layered with voile on a calico or canvas background. I then machine embroider into this background. I also use techniques such as appliqué and burning or cutting back through the surface to expose the layers beneath. The pieces are sometimes hand embroidered as well as machine stitched and I also sew beads or other objects onto some of the work.

I have now developed a technique which enables me to produce work which looks similar to the hand-made paper pieces but on a much larger scale. The background is made of fabric instead of paper. This is painted in the same way as the hand-made paper and then fabric and other media are applied using machine and hand embroidery.

My inspiration comes mostly from the countryside and the sea and the sky. Sometimes I just start with the materials and let the ideas develop as I work. I rarely use a sketchbook or photographs to work from. I look at things and let the ideas develop in my head. Once I get started on a piece it progresses partly from the ideas that I have visualised in my head and partly from the random things that happen as part of the process. The mixture of the random and the controlled elements mean that there is always a problem solving aspect to producing a finished piece which I find interesting. I like the spontaneity of working in this way as there is rarely a totally predictable outcome.