The Worshipful Company of Gold and Silver Wyre Drawers Runner Up

Fleur Webb is a mixed media hand embroidery artist from the New Forest. She has dedicated her practice to exploring the interplay between beauty, femininity, and vulgarity.

With a profound interest in contemporary and controversial themes, she employs gold work, raised work, and tambour hand embroidery techniques to bring these contrasts to life.

Fleur has drawn inspiration from the deep sea, a realm of profound depth and layered complexity, much like hand embroidery. The Midnight Zone, spanning 1,000 to 4,000 meters below the surface, houses creatures that have adapted to its harsh conditions. With no sunlight penetrating, this oceanic layer lies in pitch darkness meaning our creatures of the deep have evolved to create their own light, their own bioluminescence.

With the decadence of goldwork and tambour techniques and the structure raised work embroidery provides, Fleur investigates the beauty, fear and unknown of the deep-sea in a way science cannot, through imaginative, contemporary hand embroidery. Thalassophobia is the fear of deep water.

The ocean, much like hand embroidery, is composed of layers. The Midnight Zone, stretching 1,000 to 4,000 metres below the surface, is a world of pitch darkness where creatures have adapted by creating their own bioluminescence. With only 5% of the ocean explored, much of its depths remain unknown, leading to the neglect of its fragile ecosystem. Through “Thalassophobia,” Fleur aims to explore the ocean’s mysterious layers using hand embroidery to express the beauty, danger and fear embodied by deep-sea creatures.

For this design, she focused on raised and three-dimensional embroidery techniques, blending traditional methods like goldwork and couture tambour with modern, handmade materials. She created melted vinyl sequins and glow-in-the-dark polymer clay beads to reflect the bioluminescence of deep-sea creatures. These layered textures bring the mysterious depths of the ocean to life in a wearable art form, representing imagined creatures from various species that thrive in this harsh environment. The piece is further defined by its physical and conceptual layers.

A sheer slip dress with a seafoam green outer layer and dark teal lining symbolises the ocean’s surface and the Midnight Zone. Layered barnacles at the shoulders represent surface dwellers, while flowing tentacles mimic the ocean’s descent into darkness. This layered design, both in texture and colour, conveys the eerie beauty of the ocean’s depths, making “Thalassophobia” a deeply personal expression of Fleur’s childhood fear of deep water.