Meet the maker Clarissa Cochran

I make small editioned woodcuts, pictures (fabric/paper collages) and scarves, etc using mainly indigo-dyed silks and cottons, and shibori techniques, (Japanese style resist dyeing). I run indigo dyeing workshops throughout the summer in my garden workshop in Saffron Walden in Essex - see my website www.indigosilks.co.uk for more details.

Brought up in Cambridge and spending many childhood holidays on the north Norfolk coast, the sea became a recurrent theme. I studied costume design at Wimbledon Art School but disillusioned with work in the theatre, and inspired by Kathleen Raine’s “The main function of art is to heal the soul”, trained to become an art therapist.

I taught painting and drawing in Community Education as my children grew up, and have always painted and worked with fabrics. Inspired by the Japanese approach to design, and their special approach to dyeing, indigo dyeing became a vehicle for working on fabric collages inspired mainly by rivers the sea and the night sky, and as a means of reaching many people through workshops. I am motivated by a need to respond to ‘the beauty of the earth’, whether in the precise designs of nature or the spirit of place in the broader landscape of the East Anglian coast–line.