Every summer we go to New Designers at the Business Design Centre in Islington, looking for the people who will be making the pieces our clients want in ten years’ time. One year the work that stopped us was by Jacky Puzey, a Bristol-based textile artist whose embroidered foxes, crows and hyenas look as if they have walked in off the street and into a Victorian nature print.
Her pieces combine digital embroidery with layers of laser-cut sheer fabric, feathers and fur. Up close they are wild. On a wall they read as something between a painting and a tapestry.
How she works
Jacky starts with her own drawings, which she works up in Photoshop and runs through programming software for a digital embroidery machine. The stitching is constantly interrupted so she can add other materials, often one at a time by hand: feathers, fabric, wallpaper, dried flowers and leather. The hyena, for example, has goat fur and feathers worked into it. Each piece is then finished by hand, often with a wash of paint.
Her preferred base is a heavy organza, traditionally used for kimonos. It is translucent, so once a piece is framed you get a faint view of the wall behind it and soft shadows from the embroidery. That extra layer is a large part of why the work looks so good in a room.
Urban wildlife
Her subject is the feral side of the city: the foxes, birds and scavengers that live alongside us in a man-made world. She takes the pastoral nature and flora imagery the Victorians and Edwardians loved and gives it a modern, slightly unruly edge.
The work has been recognised widely. She was awarded at New Designers and took the top prize at the Hand & Lock Prize for Embroidery for the way she combines hand-drawn line with digital technique. She has since been selected for Homo Faber, the Michelangelo Foundation’s guide to fine European craftsmanship.
Commissioning a piece
Jacky takes bespoke commissions. A detailed piece of around 80 by 140cm takes about two months to make. If you are happy for your design to be produced as a small edition, usually of around five, the production cost comes down by roughly a third.
We first had her in mind for a Knightsbridge project, and her work suits exactly that kind of room: a hallway or a dining room where a client wants one piece with real presence that is not another canvas. Frame it with a little space behind the organza and let the shadows do some of the work.
A piece like this takes longer than buying a print and costs more. It is also the thing guests will ask about first, and it will not be on anyone else’s wall.
