Emily Jo Gibbs is a textile artist creating hand stitched Portraits and Still Lifes with a graphic quality. In recent times she has been working on a project she describes as The Value of Making. Emily grew up making things and watched her mother sew but when the time came to go to university she decided to study Wood, Metals and Plastics at Wolverhampton and then moved into a career making unusual handbags. She was very successful and and there are some examples of her work in the V & A Museum. Things changed after 9/11 and there wasn’t the same market for her designs so she moved on to make stitched portraits and began a collaboration with Bridget Baily.
Bridget was a milliner who brought a different perspective to their work. She wasn’t keen on conventional portraits and preferred to portray people by the things they used. She made a pin cushion to represent Emily because she was a stitcher and this concept gave Emily the idea of doing a series of tool portraits. The Craft Council accepted an application to create to a series of seven portraits of people represented by the tools of their trade. Emily visited all seven makers to get a feel for them and to see how they worked. Among them were a furniture maker, shoe maker/cordwainer , a ceramicist and a jeweller. The pieces are made using organza on linen and using stab stitch and the results have an other worldly feel as if she has got into the soul of the makers.
This was followed by the Boat Builders. Emily was commissioned to do a piece to represent Lymington in the New Forest and rather than follow the conventional route of ponies and trees she chose the boat yard in Lymington. She spent a day with the apprentices learning how they approached the job and ended up doing a portrait of a paint sprayer! The apprentices were intrigued by her work and went to the exhibition to see the final work.
Emily is a member of The 62 Group of Textile Artists. This was formed by graduates for Goldsmith’s College in 1962 to challenge the boundaries of textile practice. In order to maintain membership you have to keep exhibiting and that was partly responsible for Emily embarking on her Nature Table works. Things like sticks in jam jars, flowers and clouds all with that ethereal quality that marks the makers portraits. Emily was also heavily influenced by Japanese moss gardens and investigated dying using natural dyes in her work.
Emily has been Artist in Residence at Trinity Buoy Wharf in Docklands. This is an artist community right on the river and housed in an old wheelhouse. She wanted her work during her six month stay here to be informed by the people who live and work in the area so she did an awful lot of people watching! Part of the residency is outreach so she visited a local school and did some workshops with Year 5 & 6 pupils which proved illuminating. It was fascinating to see how children saw the world around them. Emily’s latest body of work is centred on clouds and she is finding new ways to portray the weather!
