Excursions into Fibre Art

[April 2026]

Loving my studio workspaces at the moment.

Dear friends, family and collectors,

This last week of March announced itself as the blisteringly hot start to summer here in the South of Vietnam. I have been here long enough now that I can declare with absolute certainty that the difference between 30℃ and 36℃ is definitely more than just a few degrees. Add to that a humidity factor of 86% and you would have pleased the cicadas enough to emerge from their yearly slumber. I should add that usually summer shows up ridiculously early, like that one guest at a party who shows up while the chairs are still being unpacked, but this year (climate crisis aside) it was gratefully (for me) 2 months late. I do love the deafening drone of the cicadas though, and happily (albeit sweatily) set off everyday in the heavy afternoon heat to take Sam for a walk while listening to the cicadas sing. I regularly thank all the gods above for air-conditioning, as I am quite convinced that I would have melted (or exploded🧐🤷‍♀️) by now without it.

My pinboards serve as sources of joy and inspiration, and help to lift my spirits on difficult days.

After completing my Green mural at the beginning of February, I hit a bit of a lull. The relative isolation of my artistic practice weighed heavily on me, a weight which is not new to me, but still surprising when it comes around for a visit. After an acrimonious ending last year with the art agency that was promoting my work, I had been too busy with other things for the emotions surrounding the event to really catch up with me. Some things take time to arrive, and this was one of them. All I will say about this is that I am not willing to put myself out there and sell my work at “all” costs, especially not if I have to endure toxic and damaging relationships to do so. Combine this with the uselessness of Instagram (which used to be a very useful tool a few years back) as a promotion tool for artists, and I found myself at a complete loss for how to get my work out into the world in a healthy (for me) and meaningful way. I have only found small pieces of the answer thus far, and expect that patience and time are going to play a much greater factor than I want them to in finding the rest.

[These days it is so easy to get the wrong impression about what it means to be an artist and to practice full-time as one, especially if you spend a lot of time on social media where everyone tends to only show their best selfs and days. The reality is that it is tough, and uncertain, and financially gruelling, and lonely, and on the worst of days even the love you have for it will not feel like enough (on those days you call your biggest cheerleaders and cry into phone). Writing these newsletters is a piece of the answer: it is a healthier and more meaningful way in which I can send a small piece of my work and practice out into the world, so that it may land where it needs to go.]

Studio details.

As a way to take care of the heavy emotions within me, I spent ample time in the studio this past month playing with shapes, fabric off-cuts and old painting rags that I used to clean my brushes and paint spills with last year. I needed to change mediums to help soothe my emotions and shift my energy. So I journeyed into sewing and quilting, both of which are pursuits that are very close to my heart. These skills were taught to me by my mom, who was taught by her mom and so on and so on. My mom quilted while I was growing in her belly (that quilt now hangs in my home (see image below), brightening up the room and reminding me of a place long lost to time), stitching with the same machine that she would later in life gift to me to use in my studio and art practice. When I sit down behind my sewing machine, I sit down alongside my mother and grandmother. There is something so precious in this. Working with a discipline that is so deeply rooted within me, helped to ground and remind me why I do what I do.

Lydia Schröder, Die Skepping/The Creation", 1992.

Last year, while making myself some new dresses I started playing with small squares of left-over cotton calico, stitching all of the odd-shaped off-cut fabric pieces onto these squares without thinking too much about the process. Like my mom I am a big believer in not throwing off-cuts away (a sentiment which is quite common in the quilting community) and have dedicated baskets for the collection of all of these odd bits and pieces. I have also been saving the old rags that I clean my paint brushes with for years now, and have begun to add strips of them into the mini fibre art squares as well. At the beginning of this month I dug out those two squares of colourful fun that I made last year, put them up on my pinboard. Since then they have spurned the growth of a whole new body of work, and helped to give me some hope on grey-feeling days.

Above: Baskets of off-cuts and used thread and strips of old painting rags.

Middle and below: Off-cut squares of landscape magic.

The idea behind these small squares is to momentarily suspend my critical-artist-mind and allow the carefree-child-artist within me to simply play. [I also find this to be a very useful practice to "unstuck" myself.] As I made more squares I began to incorporate shapes which tend to come out in my paintings and drawings as well. Clouds and mountains and birds and longish line-like shapes and odd triangular ones, wherever the whim was leading me there my scissors would cut. Once some basic chaos was created, I would then take step back and allow myself to go back in with a bit more thought and gentleness.

These pieces are still in the process of "becoming". I definitely want to add some beadwork to them, and once that is done I will decide how I would like to finish them. Perhaps as small wall-hangings? We'll see. I intend to hold an intimate, at-home exhibition (with an online catalogue component) at the end of the year to have the opportunity to show my year's work. [This is another piece of the answer, by the way]. These pieces will form a part of that show. I am quite excited to see what else will emerge from this series.

I had a mentor who said that if you want to work with landscapes you should live in the middle of a city, because then it is the landscape that lives within the heart that has the chance to express itself. I cannot agree more❤️

I hoped this newsletter served as a reminder that kind words of encouragement and small acts of support (like forwarding my newsletters to friends) really do mean everything to me. So don't stop. I cannot do this alone, none of us can. So thank you for being here.

May you have a wonderful Easter weekend!

All my love,

Nicola

PS. If you are reading this in its blog form, please consider subscribing to my monthly newsletter. The content is the same, but it's delivered directly to your inbox :)

PPS. As always, if you enjoyed my musings and know of anyone who might also enjoy my ramblings please forward my blog/newsletter to them, your support will be greatly appreciated. I would also love to hear from you. So any responses or comments or creative stories of your own that you might have and would like to share with me, please send me an email.  

PPPS. I know it is a Brave New World when I need to start ending off my newsletters/blogs with the statement that this newsletter was fully written by me using my fallible human mind and fingers (hands?). I have never, and will never use AI to write it for me, as the writing of these newsletters serve as a kind of month-in-review, and that is invaluable. Same goes for my artwork and illustrations. All images, photographs, illustrations and artworks which you see in my newsletters were created by me, by hand in the real world, unless otherwise stated.