London Craft Week: Sarah Simonds and the Art of Living Fibre
For UK-based fibre artist Sarah Simonds, nature is a collaborator, a material archive, and a lifelong teacher. Exhibiting as part of Future Icons Selects at London Craft Week, Simonds presents a body of work that is at once meditative, tactile, and deeply rooted in the organic rhythms of the natural world.
Working with coiling, knotting and hand-weaving techniques learned as a child at Forest School, Simonds transforms foraged and cultivated plant fibres into sculptural forms. These compostable artworks pulse with movement and texture, their twisted, woven lines echoing the graceful architecture of stems, ferns, and roots. “My creative process is not set in stone,” she explains. “It’s completely visceral… It has to feel right in my hands.”
Foraged fibre baskets by Sarah Simonds.
One of her works, Gather (lead image), is a testament to this intuitive, site-specific practice. “The inspiration for this piece came from a large clump of Black Bamboo (Phyllostachys nigra) in my garden,” Simonds says. “It flowered in 2023 - an event that only happens once in its lifetime - and began the slow process of dying back.”
Moved by the graceful beauty of its tall, darkly marked culms, she began to gather materials from her surroundings: fibres from her garden, local hedgerows and rivers, all carefully prepared and handwoven into a series of textural panels...
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Image Credits:
Lead Image: Sarah Simonds: Gather. Materials: Dandelion, Calla Lilies, Cordyline, Weeping Sedge, New Zealand Flax, English Rush and Bindweed, strung on Black Bamboo.