Anna Hutchinson, a contemporary textile and fibre artist based in county Limerick, Ireland

Working predominantly in machine embroidery, Anna creates interpretative, abstract works that explore nature, colour, pattern, and connection: the threads of life. Her pieces are stitched slowly and intentionally, reflecting a quiet sense of rhythm, presence, and emotional resonance.

Entirely self-taught, Anna has been surrounded by textiles and handwork all her life. She returned to sewing in 2012, but it was only in recent years that she fully embraced her identity as an artist; a shift that marked both a personal and creative transformation.

Her practice draws deeply from lived experience: the softness of memory, the stillness of the landscape, how everything is connected, and the ways in which threads can hold emotion, time, and meaning. She often speaks of her journey as a process of stitching herself back together one thread, one choice, one conscious return to creativity at a time.

Anna’s work is framed with care using archival methods and museum-grade materials. Each piece is one of a kind, mounted on high quality materials and housed in custom-made shadow box frames with anti-reflective Artglass.

About my work

My work is a conversation between fibres and feelings. I use freemotion machine embroidery to explore abstract forms that connect to nature, memory, and emotional landscapes. The rhythm of stitching. its repetition, its pauses, offers a space for reflection, and a way of drawing that is intuitive and tactile. Thread gives me a way to work with focus and intention. Each stitch marks time, builds rhythm, and gives shape to feeling. 

I often return to ideas of connection, inherited threads, and the emotional weight of colour. The works evolve guided by intuition more than plan. My pieces, mounted off the ground surface, invite the viewer to slow their attention, reflect, and be drawn in to the pieces; to see the beauty in the shadows cast. 

I see this free form of stitching not only as a technique, but as a way to map meaning; emotional, spatial, and inherited.