Heather Collins is an award-winning contemporary textile artist inspired by the seascapes and landscapes of her home on the Sussex coast. 

Using the natural world and it’s surroundings as her starting point she creates intricate pieces of sculpture, which reflects the extraordinary diversity of nature itself.

Her pieces, which range in size from the miniature to the majestic, often begin from a single thread, or a tiny fragment of distressed fabric. These are then free-machined together to form a larger sculptural pieces of textile that are embellished with traditional hand stitching.

Free-machine embroidery is her main medium, using the sewing machine needle as her paintbrush, the wools, threads and snippets of fabric her paints.

She is not precious about her work, often cutting it up many times, using a heat gun or soldering iron to distress the work to achieve the desired effect.

Due to lack of hand strength, she does not use a sketch book to record her ideas. Instead she records elements of interest with her camera, using found objects and revisiting the specific site of interest sometimes on a daily basis to see how the light picks up areas of interest often missed.