4me4you recently stepped inside the ever-inspiring Gillian Jason Gallery to experience “THE UNBROKEN THREAD,” an exhibition by artist Christine Westwood-Davis.
Across these transformations in medium, Westwood-Davis maintains a deep fascination with the body’s ability to endure, adapt, and evolve. Her figures are far more than passive studies; they are meditations on what it means to inhabit the female form. As a mother of six and an endurance athlete who has taken on marathons and ultra-distance races, she approaches the body as an instrument of persistence, shaped by exertion, recovery, and time.
Her artistic process channels this lived experience into form. Each stitched line echoes a pulse, a breath, a moment of physical effort. Through the repetition of drawing and sewing, Westwood-Davis converts labour into visual rhythm, creating works that seem to hum with quiet momentum.
In her current series, she turns to free-motion embroidery, guiding fabric beneath the needle to effectively “draw” with thread. The sewing machine becomes an extension of her own body, its steady rhythm mirroring hers. She describes herself as being “in tune with the sewing machine,” forming a symbiotic relationship, between artist and apparatus, discipline and freedom, that animates each composition with a sense of kinetic energy.
By reimagining the traditions of life drawing through the tactile language of thread, Westwood-Davis offers a contemporary reflection on embodiment. Her work honours the histories of textile and craft as spaces of emotional and intellectual depth, weaving them into an ongoing dialogue between body, material, and time.
The sewing machine, long tied to domestic labour, becomes a tool of autonomy, artistry, and renewal, connecting her practice to generations of women who have transformed acts of making and mending into quiet forms of resistance.
ARTIST: Christine Westwood-Davis
