The Recline / The Awakening of the Recline: Collection

2019 - Present
  • Begun in 2019 and continuing to evolve, this ongoing series of handloom-woven natural linen tapestries explores the female body as...

    Begun in 2019 and continuing to evolve, this ongoing series of handloom-woven natural linen tapestries explores the female body as a site of struggle, resistance, exhaustion, and renewal. The series comprises two connected bodies of work, The Recline, initiated in 2019, and The Awakening of the Recline, which began in 2026. Drawing on the art-historical motif of the reclining figure, I use an abstracted bodily form to consider the shifting conditions of women's agency. The reclining figure is not simply a representation of the female body, but a language through which I explore the physical and psychological demands of claiming agency, the persistence of struggle, and the freedom to move between moments of resistance and rest.

  • The figures emerge through a vocabulary of bent limbs, folded joints, and heads reduced to the presence of eyes. Neither...

    The figures emerge through a vocabulary of bent limbs, folded joints, and heads reduced to the presence of eyes. Neither entirely figurative nor fully abstract, their bodies stretch, mirror themselves, and transform across the woven surface. The loose linen threads extending from the tapestries create an imagined landscape in which forms can appear above or below a shifting horizon. In The Recline, the head hangs beneath the body, suggesting a state of suspension, retreat, or dormancy. In The Awakening of the Recline, the same bodily forms return, but the head rises above the body. This shift gives the later works their title, not as a declaration that struggle has ended, but as an acknowledgment that the position of the body, and the state of mind it evokes, can change. Awakening becomes one moment in an ongoing cycle of resistance and rest.

  • The material and process are integral to this language. The linen is woven by hand, while black acrylic paint introduces...

    The material and process are integral to this language. The linen is woven by hand, while black acrylic paint introduces shadow, weight, and definition, allowing the body to emerge from and recede into the textile. Black has become an important element in my wider practice. 

  • I understand it through the idea that once you touch charcoal, you can never be entirely clean. To address controversial...

    I understand it through the idea that once you touch charcoal, you can never be entirely clean. To address controversial subjects is to accept the reactions they provoke and the impossibility of remaining untouched by them. The willingness to take on that consequence, to get one's hands dirty, has grown through my own experience as a woman and as an artist.

  • For me, these works hold the contradictions of claiming agency. To enter spaces where women have not traditionally been expected or welcomed is to encounter challenges that are both physical and psychological. There are moments of rising, asserting oneself, and occupying space, and others when the body and mind need to lie dormant. Neither state negates the other. Through the recurring figure, the woven surface, and the tension between the defined form and the unravelled thread, the series considers agency not as a fixed achievement, but as a condition continually negotiated, lost, recovered, and reimagined.