Artist Statement
Artist Statement
Del Elle — Liverpool, UK
I work across hand embroidery, marker ink abstracts, instrumental music and writing. The work is connected across all four disciplines by a consistent sensibility — contemplative, atmospheric, concerned with place, and built from the accumulation of layers.
Every piece begins with an external prompt. A view from a window. A photograph taken at the moment a building comes down. A piece of music that has always struck a chord. An evening sky sketched quickly before the light changes. The external world provides the starting point, but the finished work is rarely a transcription of what was observed. The overcast sky at Bamburgh Castle becomes a spiral vortex of purple cloud. The Easter evening sketch becomes a colour field in thread. The beat and chords that waited years in the mind before finding a way out become an instrumental piece influenced by the interlocking patterns of Steve Reich.
The process is consistent across media: observation, response, abstraction, accumulation.
The Embroidery and Marker Ink Abstracts
The hand embroidery series works in two directions simultaneously. The abstract pieces — Warm Sunset, Cool Morning and Violet Morning — reduce landscape to its essential elements: horizontal bands of colour and light, stitched by hand onto cotton fabric in deep beechwood hoops. These pieces are inspired by the colour field paintings of Mark Rothko and by the understanding that a landscape does not need to be legible to be felt. Warm Sunset was the first and most experimental of the three — the beginning of a language. Cool Morning arrived as its counterpoint. Violet Morning followed as the third element that opened the series outward, belonging neither to warmth nor coolness but to something between the two.
The Old Swan series — Winter and Summer — works differently. These are documentary pieces as much as aesthetic ones. From a bedroom window in Old Swan, Liverpool, a view opened up gradually over several years as the buildings in front of it were demolished one by one. A Carpet World. A dividing wall. A Blockbuster Video store that had stood on Prescot Road since the 1990s. Each demolition revealed more of what had always been there — elm trees on a road named after a house that no longer exists, ash trees from a nursery attended in childhood and later cut down for development, the towers of Victorian hospitals, the spires of parish churches, two football grounds visible simultaneously on the horizon.
The photographs taken at each stage of demolition are irreplaceable. The window through which they were taken now looks out onto a car park and a retail park. Winter and Summer were stitched from memory, from those photographs, and from ink abstract studies made at the time — a record of a view that existed fully for only a brief window between one demolition and the next.
Each original embroidery is finished with a wooden backing disc, a felt cushioning layer, and 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 artist name itself.
The marker ink abstract collections — Sunsets and Mornings (April 2019), Fields, Mountains and Tropira (May 2020) and Sunrise, Evening and Summer (May 2021) — document the visual language that preceded the embroidery series. Twenty one pieces across three collections, working across real and invented geographies. Liverpool parks and Japanese mountains glimpsed in photographs. Views across London from Hampstead Heath and Highgate. A coastal landscape called Tropira that exists nowhere except in the work. The Bamburgh Castle coastline transformed into something between memory and imagination.
The Music
Six instrumental pieces, released in February and March 2023 and available on 26 streaming platforms. Each piece is either a response to a composer whose work has always mattered or a release of something that had been waiting internally for years.
Gymnopédie Loop is a response to the opening of Erik Satie's Gymnopédie No.1 — a desire to continue the introductory loop and let other instruments join the piano in its weaving dance. Shall We Begin? builds from a loop of vibraphone and harp, influenced by Max Richter. Morn Steps released a beat and chords that had been present in the mind for years without a means of expression. Strings Reply answers it — lighter, more ethereal, the two pieces designed to be heard as a pair. Season New is a shorter experiment with the interlocking patterns of Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians, pointing toward further work. Beach Steps explores the key of C major — a key that has always evoked blue skies, turquoise water and white beaches, the musical equivalent of Tropira.
The music and the visual work are made by the same sensibility. Both are built from loops and layers. Both begin with something external and follow it somewhere unexpected.
The Writing
The James and Jones trilogy — Prince of the Apple Towns, The Overtesian Bird and The Miaow Choir — is a whimsical YA fantasy series published under the Del Elle name. Three poetry collections and a short story are also available. The writing is a separate creative outlet but shares the same instinct for named, particular places — real, invented and somewhere between the two.
The Name
Del Elle is an artist name, maintained in the tradition of artists who choose to separate their public creative identity from their private life. The work is public. The person behind it is not.
The Practice
What connects embroidery, marker abstracts, music and writing across more than two decades of making is not a single medium or a single subject but a single method: beginning with something observed or felt, following it through a process of accumulation and abstraction, and arriving somewhere that could not have been predicted from the starting point.
The six panel panorama of the Old Swan view — sketched in both Winter and Summer versions, waiting to become embroideries — is the largest and most ambitious project still to come. It will take time. The work always does.
Original embroideries, fine art prints and greeting cards are available on Etsy.