Lydia Gluck
MA Fine Art
I recently completed an MA in Fine Art at Norwich University of the Arts, with a focus on textile arts. My background is in craft publishing as one of the Founders and Creative Directors at Pom Pom Publishing, and I chose to undertake the MA as a way to expand my exploration of craft skills as a form of personal expression, primarily through quilt-making. I created work using hand-dyed and hand-sewn textiles, developing dyeing techniques alongside my knowledge of the history and development of quilts and other textile arts.
My work for the MA has explored themes such as the reintegrating and reconciling of the self after trauma, and the simultaneously embodied and disembodied experience of wild swimming at night. Although I mainly work with textiles, I also experimented with painting, mono-printing, zine-making, and small-scale sculptural work. Textiles of all kinds have always been a powerful form of expression, regardless of how they were perceived, and despite their historic marginalisation. I see my work as part of the growing recognition of this fact and as a kind of remembering and reimagining of something that has always been there while remaining firmly in the current context.
