Amber Tomkins

I have always been attracted to the past. Books, film, fashion, and architecture. Growing up, my mother worked in a charity shop; she would bring home anecdotes from former times in the form of trinkets, VHS tapes, and paintings. They would show age, of course, in chips, marks, wear and tear, in the jittering of a tape. Little quirks which showed that these objects had a life before me. As I grew up, I began to see these marks of life as something beautiful, an inevitable sign of existence that even inanimate objects cannot escape. During my initial research for my collection, I visited stately homes and castles throughout Scotland, including a prominent visit to Inverary Castle, a place once golden and glistening but now greyed and stiff. Grand tapestries unravelled and frayed over time, mirrors rotted and bubbled, and hardware rusted and dulled, yet these objects still maintained a sense of regality and class. This collection explores the imbalance of grandeur environments and objects succumbing to the same fate of all.

All materials used are made of natural fibres to encourage each piece to age and decay in its own way throughout time. Throughout the collection, deadstock cotton, wool, cashmere and mohair yarns are used, as well as cotton and linen fabrics. Working across Dubied flatbed machines and domestic knitting machines, all knit is fully fashioned to ensure minimal waste.