…”The scientist in me did want to intervene a little more, explore cause and effect, observe, transform and look again at materials.  I learnt how to make paper, how to boil onion skins to make dye, I made paintings with mud and photocopied broken glass to make patterns.  I froze objects in water to watch them thaw and ran car tyres over my ‘road’ textiles to make a ‘real’ mark.  I read The Secret Life of Bees and promptly wanted to cover everything in honey – inspired by its imagery of the black Mary statue who was bathed in honey as worship.  I still have the screen print on a swatch of cotton in my sketchbook, richly preserved in a honey layer – nine years on.

Starting C F McEwan was, I told myself, the respectable face for all this random experimenting.  I was becoming overwhelmed by my imagery and was probably looking to give it a home.  Five years later, combined with photography and some brilliant digital print technology, there are collections of scarf designs containing all this imagery, locked up in the print.”  Read more here