Vintage book cloth on board

31 x 26cm

2024

Framed

Katie Mawson - Lake District based designer - painter

Katie formerly trained as a textile designer and has for many years run a successful knitwear business. Her main strength has always been her use of colour and her fascination and love of colour has more recently taken her down the Art path.

Over the past couple of years Katie has been collecting vintage cloth bound books from local charity shops, she uses the cloth from these books as both her palette and canvas. The array of colours is infinite, many of them faded and marked through time . . . they all have a former life and story.

She slices, cuts, rips and skins these beautifully marked and faded cloths from their boards; this is all part of the making process . . . deconstructing to then reconstruct into something new.

Katie spends hours arranging and rearranging shapes and colours, often starting with one idea which evolves into something else along the way. She likes this fluidity, for her it is all about colour balance, positive and negative spaces and creating a sense of tranquillity. During the process of making there are so many different emotions going on, it can be exciting, daunting, frustrating, hopeless . . . all of these feelings along the way; then, when she thinks something is ‘finished’ there will be a brief feeling of satisfaction before her critical eye comes in again. This is where she stops and moves on to the next piece of work.

She lives in the Lake District and wild swims at sunrise throughout the year; the quietness and calmness of these swims, along with the changes in weather and seasons, inform her work as does the ageing process within more urban environments; she likes to juxtapose the beauty of urban decay and dereliction with the purity of nature.

Exhibition: Colour field: Kirsty Adams, Jill Campbell & Katie Mawson, 31st May - 6th July 2024

Information for buyers
This work is available through Own Art