Art Talks with Lottie Delamain

Art Talks with Lottie Delamain at Heart of The Tribe Gallery, 17th July 2022

“Lottie was invited unseen- all our other speakers / artists I knew them or their work prior to inviting them.

One of the reasons Lottie sounded so interesting was her quite recent move  between textile design to garden design, I hoped she would talk about how  and why she did this and what she had learnt from it.

She started her talk answering those questions, some years ago she moved to Vietnam and became fascinated by the women from a certain tribe using local plants to create clothes dyes. When she returned to England she decided to do a gardening design training and after a year began to explore applying her textile experience in composition and colour as building blocks for her garden designs. The 2nd half of the talk was sharing her recent experience of creating a garden at RHS Chelsea that merged these two worlds – a textile garden that explored the relationship between what we wear and what we grow. She emphasised how important collaboration was in this process as at an early stage she invited a major fashion company to come on board which opened up many more possibilities of an larger and more mixed audience.

She also talked about the importance of giving oneself limits in the creative process and sticking to them. Her example was how she only used plants in her garden that could create dye, which meant she had to think about her design in a very different way than she would normally in a commercial context.

Lots of enthusiastic questions after from the audience, from discussing dying techniques to the change at Chelsea concerning it’s awareness of sustainability and climate change.”

Melanie Thompson

To learn more about Lottie and her work please visit her website on www.lottiedelamain.com or follow her on social media @lottie_delamain