Artist Statement
Heather Aspinall is a textile artist with a lifelong passion for the drape, shine & texture of textiles. She is also passionate about the millennia-long tradition of textiles, and feels deeply that she is a small contributor to the way in which women have expressed themselves artistically over the centuries. She loves the way textiles are truly art for the body to wear, art in the third dimension, personal, meaningful, moving and evocative.

She's inspired by anything that evokes memory and a sense of the universals in humanity - history, nature, the universe, fairy tales & mythology. Heather is particularly influenced by historic costume and illustrators from the golden period of children's book illustration at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century and her work reflects a fascination with historic detail and a pre-modern aesthetic.

Heather loves to experiment with natural fibres and fine art techniques to produce unique, well-made and beautiful works of wearable art.

She lives with her husband and son in an old worker's cottage in a Canberra heritage area, her studio nestled amongst the old orchard trees in her drought-faded cottage garden.

Qualifications & Experience
It seems that Heather has always been playing with fabrics and designing since she was a small child. As a teenager this became a fascination with sewing and crafts, particularly historic crafts such as tambour embroidery, and she completed her final year art project in theatrical design in high school. Her projects have always had an other-worldly quality and you can see this imaginative aspect in her current work. Since graduating from the Australian National University with a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in the History of Art, Heather has learned many skills in the textile arts through workshops and other courses - shibori and other dye-techniques, free-machine embroidery, creative & art-quilt techniques, costume design, learning from and being inspired by some of the most talented artists in the textile world; Kirry Toose, Carol Wilkes, Julie Ryder, Bonnie Begg, Joan James, Ana Lisa Hedstrom and Sandy Webster. She has shown her wearable art at Australia's Fashion Fantasia wearable art parade, exhibited with Craft ACT, The ACT Textile Arts Association and the Majura Women's Group, as well as giving something back to the vibrant textiles community through her work on the committee of the ACT Textile Arts Association.

Resumé

Heather modelling her wearable art,
'Rosewater Swirl'