18/05/2026
Writing a biography for an intro at the talks and workshops I’m giving and remembering who I am…
Helen is an exhibiting textile artist, lecturer, and adult tutor with almost three decades of experience in her field.
Helen began her career as a textile artist and tutor in 2001, teaching City & Guilds Embroidery and Machine Embroidery before moving into freelance practice. Since then, her work has been featured in numerous textile and embroidery magazines and books, and she has exhibited widely in joint, juried, and solo exhibitions both nationally and internationally.
Her achievements have been recognised with awards at some of the UK's most prestigious textile events, including the Fashion & Embroidery Show, the Festival of Quilts, the Great Northern Quilt Show, and the Scottish Quilt Championships.
Helen's artwork spans a broad range of media, deliberately blurring the boundary between craft and fine art to create work that resists easy categorisation. Helen has long drawn inspiration from the windswept hills of Northumberland, from history and the natural world, and more recently from the west coast of Scotland and the contrasting cityscape of Edinburgh.
Today, Helen presents her illustrated talk, “Disassembled and Reassembled: Making, Persistence, and the Return to Practice” — a candid and personal journey through the last eight years of art and life via divorce, a PhD in eighteenth century history, house moves, a new career, and an eventual return to the needle, it is an honest reflection on creativity, resilience, and what it means to find your way back to making.
