Debbie Smyth is a thread drawings artist; Her playful yet sophisticated artworks are embroidered using thread and pins alone. She stretches a mesh of threads between the pins to create her art. From a distance her work looks as if it was composed of pen sketches on a drawing pad because it tends to have this quality to it, and beautifully blending the boundaries between drawings and textile art and literally lifting the drawn line off the page.
She stars with sketches first, then using a projector, projects these sketches on the gallery wall in order to create a framework of points from pins. Rather than making her work look polished she leaves the threads hanging as a way to show the nature of her creative practice.
The image above is a Jubile Bridge installed on 21 Feb-11 April 2009, commissioned as part of the exhibition Material Evidence at The Brindley, Runcorn. It is five metres wide by two in a half meters high, made up of three panels, which were constructed off site and then installed and linked together on site.
