For over four decades, Christine Westwood-Davis has studied the female body through drawing - a practice that has evolved from charcoal to thread, from the immediacy of line to the weight of material. Across these shifts in medium, one thing has remained constant: a fascination with the body’s capacity for endurance, adaptation, and change.
Born in Hertfordshire in 1956, Westwood-Davis studied Fashion, Design and Technology, where she first began to think of the body not as something to be adorned, but as a structure to be understood. “I was more interested in the body in the clothes than the clothes themselves,” she recalls. The technological side of her studies proved pivotal. In the early 1990s, she became one of the first students to use computer systems to draw and design for textile art, discovering how mechanical processes might alter the act of mark-making. This early exploration led her to a postgraduate research degree at the Royal College of Art, where she investigated the differences between traditional drawing and the use of a computer as a sketching tool. Such inquiries laid the foundation for her later synthesis of the machinemade and the handmade.
Most recently exhibited at the Royal Academy’s 2025 Summer Exhibition, Westwood-Davis’ works exemplify her ability to transform the fluidity of charcoal into the permanence of thread. Through this ongoing exploration, Westwood-Davis collapses the distance between body, tool, and surface. The act of sewing becomes a kind of choreography: an interplay of movement, control, and chance that makes visible the intimate connection between labour and expression, her stitched drawings embodying the resilience of the female form.
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Very Well Red Eliza -
Atlas Yueh
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Blue Tiger Yueh
