Meet the Artist

Carol Naylor

Carol Naylor makes machine embroidered textiles by stitching directly onto painter’s canvas using a wide range of rayon, metallic, woollen and cotton threads.

Intensive, continual stitching changes the base fabric from a flat surface to one that moves and undulates with its own unique quality. This technique gives her more painterly approach to textile art, with the sewing machine needle providing the marks a paintbrush or pencil would make, and the richly coloured threads offering a wide and exciting palette.

Her work is about the exploration of surface and mark making. The surface of the fabric that she stitches onto is manipulated and changed by the techniques she employs, and the surface of the land provides her with visual stimuli that she seeks not to emulate, but to investigate. Smaller, more intimate works concentrate on the landscape observed on her travels throughout the UK, France, Italy and Spain

Inspiration has always come from two sources. Personal experiences and observations provide the source materials, whilst the works of specific artists have informed her use of colour and line. Poetry is another source that she draws upon to help her formulate her ideas.

Her work has been exhibited widely throughout the UK including several solo exhibitions, the most recent being Borderlines that toured in 2008 with the Knitting and Stitch shows.

Other exhibitions include a two person show with Alice Kettle and a solo exhibition at the National Museum of Textiles in Lisbon. She currently has work touring France with the Pfaff Embroidery Challenge. She gives workshops, talks and residencies and works to commission. She has taught in the USA and New Zealand, and has also exhibited in France, Spain and Portugal

She has a particular interest in Art in Hospitals and her work is represented in corporate, public and private collections including GlaxoSmithKline’s renowned art collection and in hospitals in West Sussex, Surrey, Essex and the IOW. She also currently co-curates the annual winter exhibition of the Society of Designer Craftsmen in January at the Mall Galleries London and has just completed four years as Chairman.