When I first began making artworks over a decade ago, I was instinctively drawn to the materials and methods of Haute Couture. The rich histories, intricate surfaces and rigorous handcraft felt, to me, like the highest form of artistic expression. Yet outside the atelier, these gestures were often dismissed. They belonged to fashion, not art. That didn’t make sense to me.

To understand it, I turned to a familiar framework grounded in maths and analysis. I developed a series of conceptual equations styled using mathematical notations, a reflection of the maths based calculations I use at the start of all my artistic projects.

In layman's terms, I identified five key forces at play in the fashion world: 

Creativity, Craftsmanship, Commerce, Corpus, and Celebrity

Through this lens, I examined how different eras of fashion prioritised these elements. In postwar Haute Couture, I saw a near-equal balance. In contemporary fashion, celebrity began to outweigh creativity. In fast fashion, commerce and the body dominated entirely, at the expense of both creativity and craftsmanship.

This framework gave me language for what I was doing in my own practice. My hand-embroidered works did not serve commerce or celebrity. They were not made for the body. What remained was the essential core: Creativity and Craftsmanship. I began to think of this process as Abstract Couture, a form of visual language liberated from commercial demands and bodily function.

But these works are not pure abstraction. They hold memories. As I researched the lives and legacies of couturiers, I found myself drawn to the visual codes and recurring motifs that shaped their identities. My pieces distill these references into pared-back, meditative and richly layered compositions. Removed from the ephemeral world of fashion, they become sites of reverence and critique.