The Secret Garden
Chloe Drew
Chloe Drew is a designer maker who uses advanced hand embroidery techniques to create contemporary interior products. She uses a range of materials to create 3D sculptural pieces celebrating pattern, vibrant colour and floral inspiration. Her original patterns elevate her work and make them more individual with bespoke embroidery techniques that allow her signature style to push the boundaries of decorative interior trends.
Having a strong theme with many colour and pattern options is important to Chloe when starting a project. Her passion for colour is obvious throughout her work. Her designs might use many colours or just a select few depending on trends and her response to these. When it comes to pattern, many styles influence her, she looks at elements of nature and motifs to create her own stylised designs for embroidery and print. For her project, ‘Living with Pattern’, she has made a piece called ‘The Secret Garden’ which is a decorative sculptural installation as a centre piece on a table. Using the inspiration of nature around her she has created a 3D embroidered flower garden.
Chloe’s inspiration for this project started at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, the summer home to Queen Victoria, a place rich in traditional British and Indian culture, making it very interesting to explore the many colour and pattern options. Chloe sees people commissioning her to create bespoke pieces which she can change and adapt according to each client’s preferences, e.g. changing flowers to different colours and styles. Chloe can also see her work being shown in galleries as she has many ideas on how she can adapt and transfer her work on to furniture or just as decorative sculptural pieces to use for celebration events such as weddings and birthdays.
Having an advanced range of knowledge in different embroidery techniques makes Chloe unique with how she can provide very technical embroidery, she takes influences from all embroidery techniques and uses them together to create individual work.
The technique Chloe uses the most is Goldwork as she loves the way it makes her work shine. Not necessarily used in a traditional way, she explores different wire colours and different ways to make it exciting, mixing it up with other embroidery techniques on her petals and pattern designs. These display how she pushes boundaries to make her work as unique. Tambour embroidery has helped her to quickly secure wire around the edge of her petals to give the fabric structure. Chloe uses many substrates to create a wide variety of flowers, mixing natural and man-made fabrics to give each one a unique texture and appearance.
Chloe will graduate from the RSN’s BA (Hons) in Hand Embroidery this summer 2020; this Degree has given her a very accurate and high level of training in hand embroidery. The course also provided a lot of work experience and international exhibitions. She has worked for Creative Director Patrick Grant’s ‘E. Tautz’ menswear brand, had her work shown at visual artist Susan Aldworth’s ‘Out of the Blue’ exhibition, and been part of the Ralph & Russo embroidery team working on a collection shown at Paris Fashion Week. Chloe’s work has been shown in UK galleries as well as in South Korea with her Hanbok piece. She received a Commendation for her work from the Bradford Textile Society which was then displayed in their gallery. Whilst at the RSN, Chloe has received The Worshipful Company of Needlemakers bursary over the course of her three year Degree.
You can follow Chloe on her Instagram page.
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