Rosie MacCurrach is an Artist and Textile designer, living in Hampshire. She studied at Chelsea College of Art in 2003 with BA 1st in Textile Design, specialising in print. Rosie has since worked as a Print designer, Artist and Dyer in Fashion, Illustration, Theatre, Film and more recently Interiors, working as Designer, Head of Studio and Director at Fermoie until 2021. She spent a postgraduate year at the Royal Drawing School, and a year as Artist in Residence at Great Dixter House and Garden. She has been a visiting lecturer at Chelsea College of Art, and taught at The National Theatre, The Royal School of Drawing, Great Dixter House and Garden, and currently teaches at We are Wild in Yorkshire and West Dean College alongside her own practice of making landscape-based drawings and textile design consultancy.
"During my degree I worked as a colour mixer for Artist Ben Johnson and at the National theatre in the Dye Room. When I graduated, I went straight to work in Film as a Dyer and Textile artist, followed by 3 years working as a print designer in Fashion, then went to work at the National Theatre in their Dye room and Costume department for 8 years, Dyeing, hand painting and printing costumes. I did a post graduate year at the Royal Drawing School, a year-long residency drawing and recording life in the garden followed by solo show. I began teaching, and working in film, before I went to work at Fermoie for 5 years.
Being intrigued and commissioned with the detail but always viewing your work as part of a bigger picture has always been an essential part of my craft and has instinctively influenced my drawings. Seeing pattern and rhythms, and then weaving them into a sense of place is an irresistible combination. I am often looking for a composition that feels like a stage and the trees the players.
Exploring the landscape, tracing the shapes and rhythms with your eye, and translating it into marks on paper feels like a very personal and primal way of engaging with a place, responding to weather, light, smells and atmosphere.
I am drawn to landscapes shaped by human presence, whether it be a drilled field or ancient earthworks, it is a practical, shared, and ancient place. I love to combine larger spaces with tiny detail that makes up the tapestry of the ground.
I find myself looking for shapes that seem to snap together like a stained-glass window and the spaces between them, enfolding spaces, hidden spaces. My compositions seem to echo the way apples fall off a tree in a reflective circle, ripples, plough lines or the way earth works radiate outward. Drawing is an action of reverence and connection and a celebration of pattern and the spirit of place."