The Unbroken Thread: Christine Westwood-Davis
For over four decades, Christine Westwood-Davis has studied the female figure through drawing - a practice that has evolved from charcoal to thread, retaining the immediacy of gesture while acquiring the depth and weight of material presence.
Across these shifts in medium, one thing has remained constant: a fascination with the body’s capacity for endurance, adaptation, and change.
Westwood-Davis’ subjects are not passive studies; they are meditations on what it means to inhabit the female form. As a mother of six and an athlete who has pushed herself through marathons and ultra-distance races, Westwood-Davis approaches the body as an instrument of persistence - shaped by effort, recovery, and time.
Her practice translates this lived understanding into shape: each stitched line echoes a pulse, a breath, an exertion. Through the repetition of drawing and sewing, she transforms physical labour into visual rhythm.
In her current work, Westwood-Davis employs free-motion embroidery, guiding fabric beneath the needle to “draw” with thread. The machine becomes an extension of the artist, its rhythm mirroring her own. As Westwood-Davis describes it, her body is “in tune with the sewing machine,” forming a symbiosis - of artist and apparatus, of discipline and freedom - that animates each composition with a sense of kinetic energy.
In reimagining the traditions of life drawing through the language of thread, Westwood-Davis offers a profoundly contemporary reflection on embodiment. Her work reclaims the histories of textile and craft as spaces of intellectual and emotional depth, situating them within the ongoing dialogue between body, material, and time. The sewing machine - long associated with domestic labour - becomes a tool of autonomy and creation, linking her practice to a lineage of women who have turned acts of making and mending into forms of resistance and renewal.
