About

I am a Textile Artist and passionate advocate of sustainable living specialising in free machine embroidery, hand stitching and mending. In my textile practice, I explore my surroundings interpreting what I see in embroidery. Mywork has been exhibited in the United Kingdom, Canada, Netherlands and Australia.

My practice engages with the natural environment recreating images and shapes in my embroidered works in 2 and 3D form. In my work I am able to portray social issues including environment, climate change and the treatment of asylum seekers. Textiles are the perfect medium for expressing thoughts using hand and machine stitching.

I work with found materials and find joy in the unexpected uses that can be found for them. I love this unpredictability and enjoy the inventiveness necessary to transform them. I use materials that are reclaimed, things with a history that have been discarded and might otherwise end up in landfill.

In creating my Textile Kintsugi pieces I use the principles of Kintsugi, a Japanese repair method, as a process to recreate discarded ceramics. Using reclaimed textiles, many hand-dyed, to wrap broken pieces and reassemble them with stitch, enhancing the breaks. As with Kintsugi the aim is to celebrate the imperfections, recreating the ceramic to become more interesting for its irregularities giving the object a new lease of life that becomes more refined thanks to its ‘scars’. 

I was invited to Curtain NT for a residency in 2019, a finalist in the John Villiers Art Prize 2021 and the Australian Textile Art Award and Toorak Sculpture Award 2022, a finalist in the International Textiles Biennale, touring Australia 2023-24 and Mava Art Prize 2023, along with exhibiting in group and solo exhibitions. My recent projects include facilitating the Moreland Quilt in 2017 – a community arts project, exhibiting in Melbourne galleries and teaching workshops in hand embroidery, free machine embroidery, mending skills and garment reinvention. I also accept commissions to mend other people’s favourites 

I am the founder of the Naarm Textile Collective, curating their bi-annual exhibitions, a member of the Victorian Embroiderers Guild, Society for Embroidery Work (S.E.W.), Craft Victoria and Melbourne & Victorian Arts Inc (MAVA). My work has been featured in Textile Fibre Forum, Fibre Arts, The Age, Machine Embroidery & Textile Art magazine and on Fibre Arts Take Two.  See my CV here.

Workshops

I have been making, altering and mending my clothes since a teenager.  I love to personalise my wardrobe through embellishment and visible mending.  We all know that fast fashion is not sustainable so we need to love the clothes we already own and work harder to make them last. By mending our clothes we create a bond with them ensuring we wear them longer.  I am happy to accept commissions to mend your favourites.  Feel free to get in touch with me to discuss your individual piece.

I enjoy teaching various forms of mending and embroidery. It is a core part of my practice along with my work promoting and facilitating community arts projects and sustainable practices. I hold workshops in Melbourne and sometimes further afield. See my workshops page for the latest dates and locations.

I regularly work with Councils, Libraries and Corporate entities holding workshops.

Projects

I am the founder and curator of the Naarm Textile Collective, a collective for Melbourne artists using textiles in their practice which I founded in 2019. I curated the group exhibition Stitching Change in 2020/2021 which was presented online and at FortyFiveDownstairs and the 2023 exhibition Uncommon Threads.

In 2017 I facilitated the Moreland Quilt – a community engagement project to create a quilt representing City of Moreland resident’s cultural diversity, whilst recording the history of participants. To see the project go to the Moreland Quilt page.

I am happy to accept commissions for my work. Feel free to get in touch. All items are handmade in Melbourne using sustainable methods, ethically sourced materials and designed to be kind to the earth.

To hear more about my work:

Publications

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Up-cycled brooch by Karhina.com
Up-cycled brooch

Why do I use upcycled, reclaimed or recycled fabric ? 

I have been creating clothing and other textile pieces for over 40 years. Generally using reclaimed or recycled fabrics as I was taught by my mother to sew and create using what was at hand wherever possible.

I am passionate about ensuring that my lifestyle is as sustainable and environmentally friendly as possible. For over 20 years I worked for Government in the UK and Australia in the sustainability field. I worked in areas creating capacity building and educational programs to assist business and households lower their energy, water, waste and transport footprints. I continue to enjoy sharing my knowledge, skills and ideas with people through my workshops and practice.

The majority of my products are made incorporating upcycled or reclaimed materials. Wherever possible additional production materials are 100 percent natural, produced sustainably and sourced locally. Every year tons and tons of perfectly good fabric ends up in landfill. A huge amount of precious water and energy goes into growing and manufacturing fabric – so lets make sure we get the most out of it before it ends up in landfill!

Each time you purchase an item made from recycled fabric, rather than buying one made from new fabric, you reduce greenhouse gas emissions, save water, reduce pollution, decrease land clearing, and keep fabric out of landfill.  So by ‘closing the loop’ through purchasing products made partially or wholly from reclaimed materials, we can ensure that the market for these materials remains strong and recycling schemes flourish.

Watch this video to see where some of your discarded clothes go –  ‘This is the final resting place for your cast off clothing’

Saves energy  

A simple cotton bag made from new fabric generates greenhouse gas emissions from the energy needed to grow and fertilise the cotton crop, to turn the raw product into fibre, the fibre into fabric. All this energy is saved when buying something made from recycled fabric.

Saves water   

Likewise by buying items made from recycled fabric rather than new you save considerable amounts of water. For example one cotton T-shirt requires 2000 -10000 litres of water to produce. For that cotton t-shirt, water is used during the agricultural and industrial stages of production: in farming the cotton, diluting the pesticides, diluting the fabric manufacturing waste products, bleaching and dying the fabric. Buying a product made from recycled fabric therefore saves 1000’s of litres of water.

Reduces negative social and environmental impacts  

Buying products made from recycled fabric also reduces other negative social and environmental impacts. Manufacturing of fabric impacts negatively on people and the planet via toxic pollution (Every new cotton t-shirt requires about 1.5kg of pesticide and fertiliser chemicals to produce), dangerous working conditions for labourers, and loss of natural biodiversity as land is cleared and used to grow crops for fibre.

Seasons - Freehand machine embroidery by Tamara Russell - Karhina.com
Seasons