Claire Buckley

Claire Buckley is a textile artist, curator, author and qualified teacher. She studied and MA in Visual Arts at West Dean College, where she specialised in tapestry and textile Arts. She lives in Sussex and has recently started to work at Charleston House, the home of the Bloomsbury Group. Her creative focus is on woven tapestry and embroidered textiles often in combination; she is inspired by words, fragments, details and patterns observed in the world. In her tapestry weaving, she builds 3D forms from flat surfaces and breaks up the cloth to create soft, sensual, undulating forms using threads of natural fibres. Taking poetic text from Virginia Woolf’s novel ‘ The Waves’, she has used embroidery and fabrics to create delicate pieces in pared-back tonal colours with added details, fragments of jewel colours and abstract patterns. The sumptuous cushions feature Vanessa Bell’s 1913 Omega Workshop fabric ‘White’ named after the suffragette Amber White. In her work, she aims to create contemporary textiles that celebrate the legacy of making in a variety of traditional techniques. Her work for ‘Textile Treasure’ inhabits the intriguing interior spaces of the historic Trereife House as a perfect backdrop to display her eclectic textiles.