Diana McKinnon MSDC

Stitched & Constructed Textiles

About Diana
Diana is a textile artist working in free motion embroidery. Diana focuses on light and the way it changes the landscape from season to season. Layers of sheer fabrics and silk paper are built up with machine embroidery to give colour, detail and texture to her work. Edges of silk paper fall free of the stitched picture to suggest infinity.
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Biography Back to top

Diana is a full time textile artist, based in South East London. She uses a technique of free embroidery and layered fabrics to create scenic landscapes of the English countryside and seascapes.

She originally trained as a primary teacher, specialising in Art and worked in a variety of schools for over 20 years. Whilst teaching she attended City & Guild Part 1 courses in Ceramics, followed by a Creative Embroidery course, leading to City & Guilds Part 2.

Diana has always been interested in the structure of buildings that time has destroyed to reveal their underlying history, edges of broken pots, layers of torn adverts on billboards, tree bark etc. She uses melting & burning to distort and change edges of fabric that are then built up and stitched. Silk paper is made in fragments so that they can also be layered and stitched to add texture to her work.

Diana uses her photographs to create her landscapes, mostly of the English countryside. English Bluebell woods form her main body of work where she can use light and colour dancing through the bare trees of spring.

Resumé Back to top

Selected Exhibitions

2018

Designer Crafts - 2018, Hand of the Maker - Society of Designer Craftsmen, Chelsea College of Arts

Bluebell Festival - Riverhill Himalayan Gardens , Sevenoaks, Kent

Sydenham Artist's Trail

2017

Bluebell Festival - Riverhill Himalayan Gardens, Sevenoaks, Kent

Sydenham Artist'sTrail

Catford Artist's Trail

Whitstable - shared exhibition

2016

SDC Mall Gallery, London

Bluebell festival - Riverhill Himalayan Gardens, Kent

Art in Action, Oxford

BBC Countryfile, Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire

Embroiders Guild touring exhibition for Capability Brown Festival

Sydenham Artist's Trail

Fish Slab Gallery, Whitstable, shared exhibition with Moira Searle

SDC CHristmas Fair. Mall Gallery

2015

Sydenham Arts Trail

Shiplake Arts Trail, Henley

Art in Action, Oxford,

2014

SDC Mall Gallery

Sydenham Arts Trail

Shiplake Arts Trail, Henley

2013 - 2008

Landmark Contemporary Textile Fair

Landmark Sparkle Fair

Sydenham Arts Trail

Windsor Contemporary Art Fair

Battersea Affordable Art Fair

Ramster Exhibition of Embroidery & Textile Art


Private commissions

Workshops

Talks

Galleries exhibiting work




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