The Hand & Lock Embroidery Mentorship Programme was introduced in 2013 to provide the selected finalists an opportunity to work closely with an industry expert and develop their designs. Each finalist has a few weeks to perfect their design with expert help in the run up to the final stage of the Prize: the live judging at the Prize-giving.
Previous mentors include designers Zandra Rhodes, Ed Marler and Amy Betts, editor of Selvedge magazine Polly Leonard and textile artists Alice Kettle, Sam Roddick and Diana Springall. In previous years many finalists have gone on to forge close personal and professional relationships with their mentors; receiving career guidance as well as help and support through the Prize process.
This year’s mentors have an invaluable wealth of expert, industry knowledge and experience across fashion, textiles, art and design.
If you are interested in becoming a mentor please get in touch at prize@handembroidery.com.
Charlotte Gaunt graduated in fine art from Goldsmiths University London and went on to complete a graduate programme at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia.
Following on from this Charlotte began work as an artist in residence at schools, setting up screen printing facilities for textiles. This led to a permanent position as a teacher of Art and Textiles. Charlotte also taught aboard academic cruises, travelling from Africa, Egypt, Petra, Seychelles, looking at the flora, fauna and architecture.
After two years Charlotte decided to pursue her own textile brand, Rediscovered By, rediscovering historical textile techniques as well as working at the V&A to catalogue the Clothworkers centre. Her work often follows the projects she is presented with such as an ornate headboard woven with Gainsborough weaving of the Three Fates and creating pressed floral artworks and drawings for a restaurant with walled gardens. Her latest collection explores scent and memory based on a poem by Sarah Howes which resonates with Charlotte’s disparate childhood growing up in Germany and Greece as well as time spent in Thailand.
Kate Tume is an artist from West Sussex whose work examines grief, transformation and divinity. She is currently creating a series of death masks depicting her own cosmology and inspired by personal losses. This work aspires to create a liminal place for the wearer to inhabit and feel their own response to death, whatever that is.
Kate specialises in embellishment, colour and 3 dimensional hand techniques, and is completely self taught. Kate’s work has featured in publications and exhibitions internationally. She won 2nd place in the Hand & Lock prize in 2023 with the first exhibit of a triptych of her masks.
She mentors and teaches textile art techniques to students from around the world via her workshops, one-to-one and online classes.
Kate Pankhurst is an embroidery textile artist. Following a successful career as a graphic designer, Kate wanted to pursue an art form full of integrity and creativity. The discovery of hand embroidery delivered on that desire. Kate graduated from the Royal School of Needlework Future Tutors Programme in 2021, gaining a Distinction.
Kate was awarded first place in the Hand & Lock Prize for Embroidery 2021 (Textile Art Student category) for her whimsical timepiece Lockdown O’Clock, as well winning the Worshipful Company of Gold & Silver Wyre Drawers Associate Award for the best use of the goldwork embroidery technique. Kate was also a Textile Art Open category finalist in 2023 for her embroidered goldfish “Fancy Free”.
Kate runs her own business teaching online, residential courses for embroidery groups, and commissions for individual clients.
Her work has been exhibited widely including the Chelsea Harbour Design Centre, The Bargehouse at OXO Tower Wharf, the RSN 150th Anniversary exhibition at The Fashion & Textile Museum, and the GSWD 400th Anniversary at the Guildhall.
In 2023, Kate was honoured to be part of the RSN team who worked on a number of items for the Coronation of Their Majesties King Charles III and Queen Camilla.
Amarjeet Nandhra is an artist and educator, originally trained in Graphic and Printed Communications. She went on to gain a first-class honours degree in Creative Arts. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, both independently and as a member of the Textile Study Group. Amarjeet’s teaching experience covers a range of courses; printmaking, mixed media and contemporary stitched textiles.
Amarjeet has taught at Diploma level, City & Guilds and Adult Education, both in Spain and the UK. Her teaching career spans over a period of forty years. Amarjeet has also worked as an Art Director on various independent short films. Her current practice explores the narrative of cloth within a social and cultural setting. This work examines the hidden meaning, looking beyond the aesthetic sensibility of textiles.
Anna Taylor is an embroidery designer specialising in freehand Irish machine embroidery and creative digital embroidery, using innovative and experimental techniques. She has worked in the industry for over a decade involved in design, development and production of high-end embroidery.
Anna mastered her skill on the Irish machine at Jenny King Embroidery, where she has been working for many years producing embroidery for incredible clients in fashion, theatre, film/tv and interiors. Including Vivienne Westwood, Tom Ford, Mary Katrantzou, The Royal Opera House and Shakespeare’s Globe.
Throughout her years in industry she has taught and mentored many new stitchers in studio and students at university. Anna has recently become a Textile Industry Patron at the University of Arts Bournemouth, presenting lectures and workshops to help prepare students for industry.
Diana Springall is one of Britain’s best known textile artists. Over a sixty year period, Diana has built a collection on the Contemporary Art of Embroidery which is available to view at www.dianaspringallcollection.
Her sixty year career in textiles includes appointments as a panel lecturer at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and chairman of both the Embroiderers’ Guild and the Society of Designer Craftsmen. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Liveryman of The Worshipful Company of Broderers and her work can be found in many private and public collections. Diana is heavily involved with embroidery within both education and museums/collections. She has been instrumental in promoting embroidery in the Fine Art world, and has been a teacher and mentor to a significant proportion of today’s greatest artists working in stitch, including Alice Kettle.
Website: www.korlekie.com
Beatrice Korlekie Newman is a designer, founder of Korlekie & Head of Department Fashion School of Arts and Digital Industries (ADI) University of East London Her designs centre on the unique craftsmanship of heritage crafts such as Knitwear, crochet and macramé, fused with modern digital technology to create sustainable, timeless pieces of clothing.
Her brand Korlekie mainly focuses on womenswear, with silhouettes and fabrications that emphasise the body and creates drama with serving of glamour. The brand has been worn by the likes of Tiwa Savage, Paloma Faith, Rita Ora and Anna Friel to name a few, on the red carpet and on stage as well as featured in the likes of Vogue, iD, and Elle amongst other magazines in Europe and internationally.
Sam D’Cruze is a passionate multidisciplinary artist and activist, experimenting with the harmony between embroidery, painting and sculpture, focusing on ‘text’ to create a narrative.
Since the death of her father, D’Cruze has dedicated her work to opening up the conversation surrounding addiction and recovery and has founded ‘Child Of Project’, a Community Interest Company. Her community work revolves around facilitating creative workshops with those who are impacted by addiction while focusing on an MRes at the Royal College of Art, researching the correlation between addiction, creativity and recovery.
Since graduating in ’97 from Central St Martins with a BA (Hons) in Womenswear Design, she has spent over twenty years in the fashion industry and launched Darkest Star, a luxury design house, regularly appearing in the pages of Schön, Vogue, Harpers Bazaar, Elle and dressing the likes of Gigi & Bella Hadid, Camila Cabello and Mary J Blige.
Social: @richardmcvetis
Website: richardmcvetis.co.uk
Portrait by Yanis Angel @ipantelon
Richard McVetis practice centres around drawing and process, specifically hand embroidery. He explores themes of geology, cosmology, the language of time, permanence, and impermanence.
Spanning the macro and micro, he records time and space through multiple dots, lines, and crosses, exploring the subtle differences that emerge through ritualistic and habitual making. The inscribed stitches mark the hand’s rhythms, a delicate performance of obsessive intricacy, refinement, and gesture. They record human presence, time and decay, each stitch or line acting as a marker for lived time, an embodiment of thought and patience. These physical, tactile, and repetitive creation modes allow him to see and think, to occupy a space.
Richard McVetis studied at Manchester School of Art before studying at the Royal College of Art, where he now teaches. McVetis has been shortlisted for several
distinguished prizes, including the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize, UK, 2023; the Jerwood Drawing Prize, UK, 2011 and 2017, and the international Loewe Craft Prize, 2018. In addition, McVetis has shown work nationally and internationally at several exhibitions, including Threads at Arnolfini, UK, 2023; The British Textile Biennial, UK, 2021; RENEW at Kettles Yard, UK, 2019; Loewe Craft Prize, Design Museum, London, UK, 2018; ‘Form + Motion’ – a major exhibition with the British Council, South Korea, 2017. In 2022 his solo show was at the Craft Study Centre, Farnham.
Website: thefiberstudio.net
Katie Wells is an abstract mixed media artist and founder of The Fiber Studio, through which she supports and promotes the works of emerging and established contemporary textile artists. After studying art history and Italian at UCL, Katie began her journey as an artist working with various textile media.
Katie found her unique style in embroidered paintings that combine gestural paint-pouring with hand-stitching on canvas and paper. The resulting works are organic and expressionistic on the one hand, but measured and meticulous on the other. Much of her work is inspired by the natural world, and throughout all her work is the suggestion of botanical influence. Alongside her studio practice as an artist, Katie works with SoLo Craft Fair, helping to create space for creators and craftspeople to establish and grow their businesses.
Elizabeth Ashdown MA RCA is one of only a few hand Passementerie artists working in the UK today, Elizabeth combines traditional and endangered craft skills with a contemporary aesthetic in order to create intriguing, energetic and playful art works and bespoke lengths of passementerie.
Working from her studio in London, Elizabeth creates work for a diverse range of clients including creating hand woven, bespoke artwork commissions for private collectors, to creating artworks for exhibitions and weaving bespoke passementerie lengths for interior and fashion designers. Elizabeth has exhibited her passementerie artworks both nationally and internationally.
In 2023, Elizabeth was awarded the first Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust ADAM Architecture Scholarship for passementerie.
In May 2024, Elizabeth’s book ‘Passementerie handcrafting contemporary trimmings, fringes, tassels and more‘ will be published by Schiffer Craft.
Website: justinebonenfant.com
Justine Bonenfant graduated in fashion design from ESMOD in 2010 before pursuing her hand-embroidery training at the Lesage School (Chanel Group) in Paris. Justine is a Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust alumni and she was awarded by HRH the Prince of Wales at the time (now HM King Charles III) at Clarence House to carry out an apprenticeship in Goldwork and Monogramming at Hand and Lock, London based embroidery atelier since 1767.
Her embroidery know-how combines both extensive French Luneville and British needle techniques. She has lived in Paris, Marrakech, London and Chennai, cities with rich artisanal heritages, where she worked for a broad range of fashion houses and ateliers, from Haute Couture to Ready to Wear and bridal. These include Chanel, Dior, Valentino, Alexander McQueen to mention a few. Some of the designs and luxury pieces she worked on were worn by the likes of Beyonce, Naomi Campbell, Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie.
Justine also works on theatre projects for Disney’s musicals. Justine is a guest lecturer at the Royal School of Needlework and a tutor at Hand and Lock. She has taught international classes in the US, Australia and Indonesia. She is also the founder of accessory label Clo de Vila. Her intricately detailed and witty hand-embroidered neckpieces and brooches got featured in Vogue, Harpers Bazaar, l’Officiel, Sunday Times Style, Hunger and Elle to name a few. Since 2023, Justine is the lead tutor of the Chanel and and the King’s Foundation Métiers d’Art Fellowship, in partnership with Le19M, in Highgrove.
Danielle Clough, born and bred in Cape Town, the fibre artist uses an array of threads and wool to create bold and quirky images on surfaces, from shoes to tennis rackets and rusted iron gates.
Since graduating from the Red and Yellow School of Advertising in 2010, Clough has jumped between various jobs and disciplines, while embroidery remained a constant hobby. Her vocation as an embroiderer has grown slowly since 2013. Since 2016 Clough has worked as a full-time time fibre artist and teacher. She has worked with brands such as Adobe, Adidas, Nike and Gucci and exhibited both locally and internationally.
Angie Wyman leads the prestigious and world-renowned BA (Hons) Hand Embroidery Degree at the Royal School of Needlework, based at Hampton Court Palace. The course is validated by Kingston University and is the only specialist degree level course in hand embroidery. It attracts students worldwide, who upon graduation build successful careers within the sector.
Working specifically within embroidery, textile art and design, Angie has more than 30 years’ experience of working within Higher Education at Degree and Masters level. Both as an Embroidery practitioner and an academic, Angie has upheld a career-long commitment to the promotion and continued practice of embroidery. Angie has exhibited works internationally, with pieces held in both public and private collections.
Stacey Jones is a textile artist and art educator living and working in London. She moved to London in 2005 to study BA (hons) Textile Design at Central Saint Martins and specialised in knitting.
Her creative practice is derived from lived experiences which are translated into colourful, intricate, abstract textile pieces. Her favourite processes are drawing, hand embroidery, screen printing, goldwork, and photography.
Stacey views embroidery as a meditative process and believes the act of making can help to improve wellness. Some of her favourite artists include Louise Bourgeois, Nick Cave, Sheila Hicks, Lenore Tawney, and Yayoi Kusama.
Website: chloeamyavery.com
Chloë Amy Avery grew up in South London before moving to the East End and beginning her studies at the London College of Fashion at the age of 16. She left LCF with a Masters Degree in surface textiles for fashion. This birthed her love of textiles and thread. Since then she has married, had children, spent several years overseas and via a few creative avenues, built her practice as an embroidery artist.
Chloe hand embroiders large scale, intricately detailed art-work as well as wearable pieces. Her style is hyper-realistic impressionism, using culture and nostalgia as the inspiration for her work. At first glance Chloe’s work could be mistaken for paint. But the atypical medium and texture of thread forces the viewer to question what they see.
She has had the privilege of working with many brands like Nespresso, Alice and Olivia and Marks and Spencer. She has stitched magazine editorials and recently been commissioned to write a book. Chloe’s work has recently extended to combining paint into her work for larger public space pieces.
Olga Prinku is an embroidery artist who uses real organic material as her thread. Olga created the concept of flowers on tulle embroidery in 2016, and her first book – Dried Flower Embroidery: An Introduction to the Art of Flowers on Tulle – was published by Quadrille in 2021. She uses various techniques to attach natural materials such as dried and preserved flowers, foliage, grasses, seed heads and berries to tulle fabric.
Olga’s artworks have been displayed at venues including Collect at Somerset House in 2023, the Aga Khan Centre Gallery and the Stitch Festival in London, The Biscuit Factory in Newcastle and the Knitting and Stitching Show in Harrogate. She has collaborated with brands such as 3PARADIS on clothing, Anthropologie on homewares and Swarovski on catalogue styling. In 2021 she was a guest judge on Kirstie’s Handmade Christmas on UK’s Channel 4 TV.
Olga lives in North Yorkshire, where she takes inspiration from nature on long walks in the local countryside. Much of her work also draws on traditional folkloric motifs of her home country, the Republic of Moldova. Before becoming an embroidery artist Olga worked in graphic design, and has a degree in the subject from the University of Cumbria.
Website: elenaciarrocchi.com
Elena Ciarrocchi is an Italian free-lance artisan, living in Porto San Giorgio, a small town on the Adriatic sea. She specialises in goldwork, working mainly in ecclesiastical embroidery, restoring and creating religious vestments.
Almost twenty years ago, after studying at the Bologna Academy of Fine Arts, she tried a goldwork embroidery workshop in Rome and immediately fell in love with it. She had the opportunity to learn from experienced embroiderers by working beside them. She now transfers her knowledge by running goldwork embroidery workshops, as so little is known in Italy nowadays. Her true passion is embroidering her fish and sea creatures!
Elena has been recently selected by Fendi, to be part of the project “Hand in Hand”, that celebrates Italian craftsmanship. Interpreting the iconic Fendi baguette by applying her goldwork embroidery technique.
Kseniia Guseva is a textile artist, based in Berlin and known as @faimyxstitch. She started her embroidery journey to cope with anxiety, eventually leading to a full career.
Kseniia’s main source of inspiration is architecture, nature, and how people interact with it. In her practice, she’s striving for zero waste and reuse of leftovers and vintage materials. The whole process is made by hand. Her work can be found in private collections all over the world.
Kseniia’s works are featured in online and printed magazines and were recently featured in the book “Embroidery. The Art of Stitches”.
Throughout the years, she has taught embroidery to more than 4000 students online.
Social: @sorrellck
Sorrell Kerrison is a multimedia artist who is best known for her expressionistic Fauvist hand embroidered textile portraits. Using a range of unconventional and improvisational approaches to textile work giving each of her pieces an individual life of its own. Her work is colourful and exciting, a visually controlled chaos that brings her subjects to life.
In 2000 Kerrison went to Salford University to attend the Television and Radio (BA Hons) degree course, specialising in editing and journalism. Kerrison used her skills garnered at University to make a spectrum of work including music videos and documentaries.
Kerrison moved to London in 2008 and worked with the Battersea Arts Centre, V22 in Bermondsey and at a variety of festivals both as a performer and in supportive roles. During this period Kerrison was also the singer and songwriter of a band called No Plato (2009 – 2011) , named after a W.H Auden poem which she loved. In 2012 Kerrison moved to Bristol and became the singer and guitarist in grunge garage band Pinot Grigio (2013 – 2017).
