Poppy Gannon is a textile artist and writer who collects and creates with natural materials. Using reparative embroidery techniques, she creates botanical sculptures by stitching into plants and foliage: a practice that reimagines modes of relating to and caring for more-than-human landscapes. Circular shapes appear throughout Poppy’s work - a motif that hints at both cyclicality and disease – whilst her stitches produce marks of restoration, making visible and celebrating what is, in most practices of repair, invisible: the art and labour of mending. By attending to objects in a state of decay, she calls into question the ethics of a century-long obsession with the disposable.
Some leaves feel irresistible to touch and work with, their intricate colour patterning suggesting the ways in which they ought to be altered. Others fall atop one another, slotting within harmonious shapes and concentric ridges; having found companionship amongst themselves for which I am compelled to craft a home. Gentle fingers must make precise movements and guide each strand of thread through the leaf, weaving them together with mindful consideration. To touch and tend to these foliage-fabrics is to know them - to become entangled in a moment where thread, leaf and body intermingle.
