The Cornish Farm Landscape

Cassandra Poad

Cassandra Poad is a Designer-Maker based in Cornwall. She focuses on transforming her illustrative and soulful designs of fauna, foliage, and the Cornish landscape into innovative textile designs of her own distinct identity. Her work is a creative marriage between traditional embroidery and textile techniques using a rich colour palette. Cassandra’s designs are depicted with embroidery on various interior furnishings, from an upcycled and renovated footstool, to everyday items like cushions.

Cassandra grew up on a working Cornish Dairy Farm, which is the main focus of her work as animals, flora, and the land are entrenched in her soul. Her work is a representation of the communication and connection between the landscape and its inhabitants, and with herself. Her pieces are snapshot narratives of individual animals or plants within their homes, as well as her home, forming a sense of place. She uses the textiles and embroidery techniques that have been instilled in her since she was a little girl, an heirloom of family tradition, alongside the embroidery techniques that she learnt during her RSN Hand Embroidery Degree. Cassandra believes that embroidery brings her illustrative designs to life by giving character and heart to each piece’s focus, via the texture, pattern and feel of the materials and stitches.

A major part of Cassandra’s work is her use of colour and shape to create personality and a ‘Sense of Place’ in her work. Her individual style of drawing, as loose and quick yet detailed, is reminiscent of an illustrative technique, capturing the spirit of each individual creature, plant, and the land itself, as a united and blended image. Transferring her style of drawing to embroidery captures the soul and essence of the subject, alongside her own soul and Sense of Place in the Cornish Countryside.

Whilst studying at the RSN, Cassandra was awarded a bursary by the Gold and Silver Wyre Drawers. She worked on the E. Tautz Autumn/Winter 2020 menswear collection by completing various darning and mending pieces which were incorporated into the clothes. In addition, Cassandra stitched epilepsy testimonials onto Victorian undergarments in UV threads for Textile Artist Susan Aldworth’s ‘Out of the Blue’ Project which were exhibited at the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle. She was also a panellist for a discussion of ‘Embroidery in Isolation’, during the Textiles from Home conference on the 15 March 2021. Cassandra has additional skills predominately in watercolours, felting, and printing, as well as being a proficient patch-worker and free-motion Quilter.

You can follow Cassandra on her Instagram page.

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