Almha McCartan

Almha McCartan is an Irish artist and designer based in London. She graduated with a BA in Textile Art & Artefact and Visual Culture from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin in 2017 and since then has worked in various areas of the textile industry whilst developing her own studio practice.

Almha’s work looks at the symbolic and emotive qualities of textiles and craft and how this relates to heritage, relationships and our environment. She has an intuitive and process driven approach to making and explores her conceptual thinking through colour, pattern and materiality. She is interested in the role textiles play in the intersection between art & design and function & decoration.

Relationship // Mamó

‘Mamó’ explores our relationship to landscape and environment in relation to making, craft and materiality.

My project began by looking into my Grandmother’s landscape paintings of Co.Down, Northern Ireland. I became interested by the close relationship she had with the natural landscape around her. I explored her version of her environment in relation to my own. I observe and capture my surroundings through photography - photos of urban spaces, objects and happenings. Through this project I interweave her story and mine, her place and mine, through making, building and collaging.

I’m fascinated by the way we as humans can invent, create and discover through our own personal interpretation of materials and things - based on our specific environment, our needs and our knowledge. I am interested in exploring the idea of how you can connect to your environment and utilise what’s around you to make something new, or useful or beautiful.

Through an intuitive and process driven approach to making, my project explores the tensions between urban and rural, function and decoration, balance and imbalance, restriction and freedom through the use of hard and soft materials. The relationship between furniture and textiles underpins the work resulting in a collection of sculptural pieces / prototypes. Created by re-purposing materials I gathered and collected from my immediate environment combined with textile processes such as hand painted fabrics and embroidery.