LL What first drew you to working in felt and moving away from the painted canvas?

SG It was during lockdown in my first year studying painting at the Royal College of Art (RCA). Before that I had done a year and a half at the School of the Damned, and went to the RCA fully planning to make maximum use of the workshops and technical support. I wanted to get into textiles and weaving as painting. The work I make is very painterly and my references remain rooted in the history of contemporary painting. When lockdown came and we didn’t have access to those workshops and technical support, felting became a means of teaching myself a process that was self-sufficient, needing only wool, soap, water and friction. We had been living on a tiny canal boat for three years but had no mains power, so it wasn’t liveable in lockdown. We came back to Nottingham, which is where my partner, Harry, is from and luckily we have lots of outdoor space here. I immediately started pushing the scale and ambition of the work with the benefit of this space. There is so much involved in the processes of felting that it opens up a whole world without needing any other technology or outside media.

LL Julia Bryan-Wilson wrote her book Fray (2017) seeking to dissolve distinctions and hierarchies between ‘fine art’ and ‘craft’, which the art world has seemed more open to in the last few years. Would you say that you are part of this wider shift?

SG The intent was there. In February 2020, I had just primed eight canvases in my studio at the Royal College and had thought to myself “I do not want to paint these!” I tried a few digital weaves at college, but the shift was then instant once lockdown came.

LL Are there particular painters or textile artists who influence you?

SG I draw a lot from how Alison Katz talks about her practice, in the ground-laying for an artwork, as well as how a design approach influences her curation of works. I take inspiration from how she builds structures in an exhibition to show the backs of works, as I also want viewers to be able to see the backs of work in The Sand In The Pearl, to reveal the pitted landscapes of those textures, and some of the otherwise invisible labour. Judy Chicago’s depiction of motherhood through symbols is also a powerful influence. In the lead up to this exhibition, I had been dealing with the egg motif as a symbol of fertility like shells, protection, cycles and amulets. However, I then had to reinterpret the egg following a harrowing experience I had whilst visiting a nursery for my child. The nursery keeps chickens outside, and I noticed a chicken with a uterus that had prolapsed after hatching an egg, which led to the prolapsed area bleeding from being pecked by the other hens. The nursery worker explained how chickens attack weakness, and that this chicken would ultimately be pecked to death! What was also interesting with the timing of seeing this was that I’d had five levels in mind when I started the series for this exhibition: heaven, comfort, domesticity, trapped and hell, as I wanted to parallel these juxtapositions between bliss and chaos in early motherhood. The incident with the chicken happened right before starting the final piece for the show, my take on Sandro Botticelli’s Abyss of Hell (1480), as I was switching between the cocooning of mother and child and ultimate destruction.

LL The hellish cave Dante depicts spiralling into the earth might also be read as a uterine environment. Do you feel attacked yourself in terms of the physical onslaught of motherhood, and arguably parasitical relationship of child on the mother’s body?

SG Until recently, I wasn’t sleeping for more than about two hours at a time, being woken up breastfeeding, and it is only since stopping that it can now stretch to three hours. I was reading Rachel Cusk’s A life’s work (2001). There is a chapter called ‘Motherbaby’ about when two bodies meld with each other, and it is a machine-like cyborg character that is non-human where the two co-exist in an almost alien other relation where (to quote from the book) “It looks like the place where the two halves of her were glued together, and gives her the worrying appearance of being handmade....” Daisy La Farge echoes this idea in Love Bug (2023) describing how when a mother has a baby, there is a physical conjoining of cells between both. It is something I think about in relation to felting, because the fibres are literally fusing together and solidifying, and when wet are incredibly vulnerable. The invisible labour of stopping breastfeeding has also influenced the making of the work behind the scenes. As I approached my take on the Abyss of Hell as the final work, I thought, “Right, I’m now working on this, and I’m now stopping breastfeeding” and that was a factor, alongside the practice, in determining the number of works I could make in this period.

LL You don’t depict maternity, but does a maternal lens influence your way of working?

SG There is a sense of hope and vigour in my practice that allows me to take more risks and not fall back on what I already know with the process. Since the RCA, I wanted to move away from image making and towards a feeling of a memory or a texture – it’s the micro of the mundane that I find fascinating. Having home experiences dictate my working patterns has given me a strange freedom. I’ve laid out a new vocabulary with detailed line work and surface-making where I am laying fibres of wool down to create texture that will set the ground for the work rather than thinking “what image am I going to make?” I’m so much more focused on making in the moment rather than thinking ahead to what it will become. I’ve got notes on my studio wall from the early stages of putting this show together about mirroring natural phenomena, and becoming a mother puts you in this beautiful, vulnerable state and literally a childlike environment to perceive what is going on around you.

LL Your work is very labour-intensive, do you think about the labours of motherhood at all when considering the labour in your practice?

SG Yes, definitely in terms of the timeframes that I now have, compared to the expectations and pressure I used to put on myself. Before I was a mother, I used to always make ‘to do’ lists, but now it feels forced to make a list ‘to do’ something, albeit I might almost need that structure more. But I feel like it’s a silver lining that having less time has lifted that expectation and pressure that I would always put on myself within the studio and in daily life. In this new territory where time is shortened, there is a new way of making where I find my own way and a studio day is structured around family life, whereas before I would think that I had to be in the studio all day long. Understanding time in a different way now, I enjoy now splitting up the time into smaller fragments, and the work is made better and is more pleasurable. I think making lists used to give me a sense of control and structure that felt tangible by writing it down. Now list-making feels totalling unfulfilling. My practice operates through a weird chaos which feels totally alien, but seems to be working.

LL So is it that you have relinquished control and are allowing the processes and different people involved in your life to lead you?

SG Yes, which has never ever happened before in the way I have worked. Without the luxury of endless hours in which to work, I am not physically able to rework or overwork the pieces. Yet I find this carries the benefit that I do not overstrain their aesthetic or meaning. I am forced by necessity to trust the process and properties of the material in these more confined pockets of time.

LL I made a short film (Are you still alive? (2022)) that was partly inspired by Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Manifesto for Maintenance Art (1969). When I interviewed artist Tash Kahn for it she said she makes lists and considers that labour as an often-gendered, female activity, potentially an extension of the maternal load. So I wonder whether the lists similarly became part of that burden for you.

SG That’s interesting, because although the ‘to do list’ was meant to lighten the load it actually added to it too. Perhaps I am instead actively trying to lighten it by letting go of the list! The list was a mechanism that was controlling what I did in the studio, that is now repelled - much as the material of wool starts to do if it is overworked, oversaturated, over machined. I find it totally surprising that this has happened! The ‘to do list’ has instead been transmuted into the physical making of the work, and in terms of priorities shifting, in becoming a mother that is something that I don’t have control over any more. This shift seems to also speak to the history of felting as woman’s craft associated with looking after both a family and a community, which was at odds with the introduction of the machine making.