About Del Elle 🐋
About 🐋
Del Elle is a Liverpool-based artist working across hand embroidery, marker ink abstracts, music and writing.
The Work
Del Elle creates hand-embroidered textile landscapes and colour field abstracts — circular pieces stitched by hand onto cotton fabric and mounted in deep beechwood hoops. Each piece follows the same process: a sketch, an ink abstract study, a greyscale panorama, and finally the embroidery itself.
The abstract series — Warm Sunset, Cool Morning and Violet Morning — reduces landscape to horizontal bands of colour and light, inspired by the colour field paintings of Mark Rothko and by sketches made on an Easter evening. The three pieces form a series: warm against cool, morning against evening, with Violet Morning arriving as the third element that opens the conversation outward.
The Old Swan series — Winter and Summer — records a specific and vanishing view in Old Swan, Liverpool. From a bedroom window, a landscape opened up gradually over several years as buildings were demolished one by one. A Blockbuster Video store. A dividing wall. Each demolition revealed more of what had always been there — elm trees, ash trees, church towers, two football grounds, the clock tower of an old hospital on the horizon.
The view no longer exists. What remains are photographs taken at each stage of demolition, ink abstract studies made at the time, greyscale panorama sketches, and these two embroideries — Winter and Summer — stitched from memory and from those irreplaceable photographs.
The Process
Every piece begins with observation — a view, a photograph, an existing piece of music, an evening sky. From that starting point comes a sketch, then an ink abstract, then a more detailed study, and finally the embroidery itself. The external world is the trigger, not the subject. An overcast sky at Bamburgh becomes a spiral vortex of purple cloud. An Easter evening sketch becomes a colour field in thread.
The marker ink abstract collections — Sunsets and Mornings (April 2019), Fields, Mountains and Tropira (May 2020) and Sunrise, Evening and Summer (May 2021) — document this process across twenty one pieces. Real places and invented ones. Liverpool parks and Japanese mountains. Hampstead Heath and a coastal landscape called Tropira that exists nowhere except in the work.
The Monogram
Each original piece is signed on the wooden backing disc with a dated monogram in the tradition of Albrecht Dürer — the month in French, the year, and the D·ELLE mark. The month in French is a quiet nod to the French language that runs through the Del Elle name itself.
The Music
Six instrumental pieces, released in 2023 and available on 26 streaming platforms. A lo-fi response to Satie's Gymnopédie No.1. A piece influenced by Max Richter, building from a loop of vibraphone and harp. A beat and chords that had been waiting in the mind for years before finding a way out. A companion piece that answers it. An experiment with Steve Reich's interlocking patterns. An exploration of C major — the key that has always felt like blue skies and turquoise water.
The music and the visual work share the same sensibility — contemplative, atmospheric, built from loops and layers.
The Writing
Del Elle is also the author of the James and Jones trilogy — Prince of the Apple Towns, The Overtesian Bird and The Miaow Choir — a whimsical YA fantasy series available on Amazon. Three poetry collections and a short story are also available.
The Name
Del Elle is an artist name, in the tradition of artists who separate their public creative identity from their private life.
Original embroideries, fine art prints and greeting cards are available on Etsy.
Visit the Del Elle Etsy Shop →