Flaxen
British textile artist Alice Fox combines found and reclaimed items with textile techniques including stitch to enhance the beauty of nature. This exhibition is a considered and contemporary presentation of both flax, fibre and fabric and will include an online talk.
Since 2017, Alice has been growing small plots of flax on her West Yorkshire allotment, gradually deepening her understanding of how growing and retting conditions affect the fibre. In 2024, she led a larger, collaborative flax-growing project at Kestle Barton in Cornwall, cultivating a 200-square-metre crop with the help of staff and volunteers. By sowing flax on the same day at both sites - 400 miles apart - she created an opportunity to compare environmental impacts on the plant. The resulting work is a collection of woven pieces that incorporate flax at various stages, from whole dried stems to unspun fibre, exploring both the plant’s strength and delicacy in a textured, structural celebration of flax.
About the artist
Alice Fox is a UK-based textile and natural-fibre artist whose process-led, sustainability-centred practice springs from a deep personal engagement with the natural landscape. With a background in physical geography and nature conservation, she works intuitively with found, foraged, grown, and gathered materials, transforming them through natural dyes, stitch, weave, and soft basketry techniques into tactile surfaces, sculptural structures, and delicate vessels. Much of her creative exploration unfolds on her allotment in Saltaire, West Yorkshire, where she cultivates and experiments with plant-based fibres- such as flax, dandelion, and bramble - discovering their expressive potential through experimentation and collaboration with the materials themselves. Alice holds an MA in Creative Practice (Leeds Arts University) and a first-class BA in Contemporary Surface Design & Textiles (Bradford), and exhibits, lectures, and leads workshops both nationally and internationally.