Whispers That Shout
For thirty years, I taught the next generation of fashion designers the discipline of structure — pattern, precision, the engineered line. This body of work is a clean break from that rigour.
Where design demanded control, I have chosen to abandon it, letting a slower, organic process take its place: one that unfolds rather than is planned.
I work at an over-scaled format, on canvases larger than the body can comfortably take in at once, built from bold, collision-prone primary colour. The works are entirely non-representational — abstract statements strong enough to hold their own within whatever space they hang in. Across the series, red recurs. It is rarely dominant, but never absent — a quiet, unmistakable signature buried somewhere in every canvas, whether the palette announces it or not.
The mark-making comes not from a brush but from the studio’s discarded relatives: kitchen sponges, building trowels, bathroom squeegees, sawdust, garden gloves. Each implement carries a history of use that a brush cannot, and each leaves behind a texture I could not have designed.
I do not impose a single technique across the work. Instead, each canvas is left to find its own outcome — resisting the normative, the predictable, the expected result — in favour of what genuinely wants to happen when unfamiliar materials meet unstructured colour.
Whispers That Shout takes its title from that contradiction: colour and mark quiet enough in their making to feel accidental, yet loud enough on the wall to command a room. What unites the series is not a style but a stance — after decades spent perfecting control, this is the work of letting go of it.
