NeedleXChange

It's the school summer holidays and I'm taking a break. So instead of new chats, I'm replaying some of my old favourites!This is a repeat of episode #45.In this episode of NeedleXChange I interview Danielle Clough, aka Fiancé Knowles.Danielle is an South African artist known for her vibrant and expressive embroidery work, characterised by bold colours, movement, and layering, creating a visual impact that evokes joy. She believes in the inherent goodness of people and the power of support a

In this episode of NeedleXChange I interview Róisín Phelan, a contemporary embroidery and textile artist who has built her practice around punch needle.Part 2 opens with practical punch needle wisdom (use the flat "wrong" side for detail, match your needle to your cloth, and keep the fabric taut), then gets into how she taught herself to embroider water and people, why she leans into a blocky, illustrative style rather than photorealism, and where her signature blue figures came from (it start

In this episode of NeedleXChange I interview Róisín Phelan, a contemporary embroidery and textile artist who has built her practice around punch needle.We start on common ground (a shared love of squared notebooks and to-do lists) before getting into how she creates the visual identity for the family brewery, the cafe, and the Colours coffee company, and how building a whole visual "world" means a new design comes together in an afternoon rather than a fortnight. Róisín talks candidly about be

In this episode of NeedleXChange, I interview Sean Alistair, a Germany-based contemporary embroidery and textile art artist known for work that mixes beauty, chaos, identity and emotional honesty.After the first chat, I realised I needed to ask Sean more directly about the work itself, so we spoke again. In this final part, we dig into Sean’s artistic practice: music as a way of naming and feeling the work, anti-war imagery, anger as creative fuel, why “pretty” can be the wrong read, how feedb

In this episode of NeedleXChange, I interview Sean Alistair, a Germany-based contemporary embroidery and textile art artist known for work that mixes beauty, chaos, identity and emotional honesty.In this part, we move from the studio into parenthood. Sean talks about becoming a dad, the strange way men are praised for basic childcare, how having a baby interrupts and reshapes a creative life, and the difference between Sean Alistair the artist and Sean the dad. We also spin through Sean's cult

In this episode of NeedleXChange, I interview Sean Alistair, a Germany-based contemporary embroidery and textile art artist known for work that mixes beauty, chaos, identity and emotional honesty.In this first part we focus on Into the Wild, the exhibition Sean curated to build community rather than simply put work on walls. We talk about diversity without tokenism, what it means to be an outsider artist, labels like queer, bipolar and textile artist, and how Sean thinks about making, destroyi