BIOGRAPHY
Harriet Batstone (b. 1999, Wales) is a London-based artist working across painting and textile. She received a BA in Fine Art Painting from Camberwell College of Arts, London, and an MFA in Textiles from Parsons School of Design, New York.
Working with natural fibres and earth pigments, Batstone moves between knitting, wet felting, painting and weaving to explore the relationship between colour, material and place. Rooted in a close relationship with the natural world, her practice draws on colour, light and landscape, translating these through tactile abstraction.
Batstone approaches colour through a painterly sensibility, building compositions through processes of layering, repetition, interlocking, compression and reconstruction. Working intuitively and in close contact with her materials, she allows their shifts and irregularities to inform each work as it develops. Across her practice, traces of landscape are absorbed and reworked through colour, material and the act of making.
Artist Statement
Colour lies at the centre of my practice. Working across knitting, wet felting, painting and weaving, I use natural fibres and earth pigments to explore the relationship between colour, material and place. My work grows from a close relationship with the natural world, absorbing and reworking colour, light and landscape through tactile abstraction. Moving between painting and textile, my works are built through layering, repetition, compression, interlocking and reconstruction. Colour is continually altered through its encounter with material, and compositions emerge through the act of making.
I came to textiles through painting and my relationship to colour remains inherently painterly. I respond to colour instinctively, allowing combinations to emerge through the process of making. In wet felting, loose wool fibres are layered, immersed in water and manipulated by hand, as pressure, friction and movement gradually fuse them into cloth. Knitting builds compositions through the slow, repeated interlocking of yarn. In my woven paintings, natural earth pigments are worked directly onto raw canvas before the painted surface is cut into strips and woven back together, fragmenting one composition to reveal another.
My hands are central to how I think and make. I layer, rub, roll, compress, knit, paint, cut and weave, remaining in close contact with the work as it develops. These tactile processes become ways of thinking through the hands. There is precision within them, but also an openness to discovery. Materials resist, merge, contract and shift. Colours form unexpected relationships and surfaces change through repetition. I respond to these changes as they occur, allowing the material to influence the direction and resolution of each work.
Across my practice, making is a way of thinking.
I am particularly drawn to the tension between control and unpredictability. Each process involves a different balance between the two. Felting allows fibres and colours to migrate into one another, while knitting gives me a more controlled way of building colour and form. Cutting into a painting means letting go of the original composition before it is reconstructed through weaving. Together, these processes allow the work to develop through an ongoing exchange with the material.