Penelope Brook
About
Penelope Brook is an artist interested in how textiles – in their making, and made – evoke and explore memory and narrative; how they excite the sense of touch; how they can invite care. Working primarily in the slow rhythms of hand-stitch, she invites reflections on presence and absence, memory and imagining.
In thinking about and making her work, Penelope draws on previous decades of work for poverty reduction and social change, and a longstanding interest in how we come to care, and how we gather the strength and courage to take difficult moral action. She is a defiantly hopeful believer in the power of beauty.
Statement
My work belongs to an age-old conversation between stitch, journey and narrative. As I stitch my way into this conversation, I want to explore the rhythms – in stitches, footsteps, the metre of a poem – by which we slow ourselves, enabling ourselves to daydream, to pay attention, to make sense of ourselves and ourselves in the world. Walking feels to me like a poetry of the feet; stitching a poetry of the hands. In my work, which uses traditional drawn-thread work as a departure point, I seek to use colour, texture and journey of stitch to intimate the rhythm and feel of my walks along the rivers and out into the meadows. I invite the viewer into their own recollections of footfalls and the dreamings; of the moments of forgetfulness and the moments of sudden and intense noticing, of walks when the brain quiets and the heart sings free.
Untitled (3 walks)
Triptych, 45 x 75 cm
Hand-dyed linen with alpaca, cotton, mohair and silk
