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Shellie Holden considers how materials such as old maps, books, sheet music and anatomical illustrations can inherit a sense of the hand made, through a process of individual hand crafting. Pieces that were once reproductions become individual artefacts, which comment on the time spent in the making process and the evidence of that memory.

Textiles becomes a unifying element to the work enabling her to explore the material aspects of surface, and textual elements of print through the processes of stitching and tracing, and repairing and piecing, to synthesise the technical with the conceptual.

Her map drawings involve locating, then tracing over cartographic routes in old fabric backed Ordnance Survey Maps, using a sewing machine as a drawing tool. It can be said that:

‘….. much information can be gathered from the gaps left in maps, not least about the map-maker’s intentions. This is one of the beauties of maps.’

She uses this notion as a visual devise in the work, to ‘un- do’ as much as ‘re- do’, extracting aesthetic qualities inherent in the map, so the stitched drawing becomes embedded into the cloth back, seen here as a blank canvas to imprint, which becomes the front of the piece, the re-made map representing a stitched impression of the former. Here, the dismantled map represents a sense of the unfamiliar, displaced from the original, creating a disorientated reading when it is viewed in reverse.

Anatomical drawings salvaged from a hospital archive became a catalyst for another series of work, through which Shellie has drawn a parallel between the ‘stitched’ work of the surgeon, and that of herself. She considered the paper as a skin, stitching along capillaries and arterial paths, making the illustration feel more tangible and alive with the thread hanging from the surface. However, the action of the sewing machine onto the paper accentuates the fragility of the ‘matter’ and becomes an intense process as much to do with ‘unpicking’, as ‘repairing.’

The word ‘Textiles’ has become a potent carrier of meaning to be manipulated, especially in relation to books and text.