The Artists and Their Practices

Arabella Strachan

Working in textiles, Arabella combines traditional and contemporary rug-making techniques with embellishment and craft processes. Her practice foregrounds the intimacy of touch and the symbolic potential of pattern. By embedding emotion and hidden desire into her motifs, Arabella extends textile traditions into the realm of conceptual and experiential art, offering surfaces that invite both visual and haptic engagement.

Fiona Johnston

Fiona’s work spans watercolour, acrylic, and monoprint, cultivating an abstract style that foregrounds light, depth, and atmosphere. Her process embraces improvisation, layering intuitive gestures into compositions that balance warmth and structure. Her palette reflects lived experience—family, travel, and natural environments—translating these encounters into a language of abstraction that privileges resonance over representation.

Lynda Sterns

Initially working in children’s decorative painting, Lynda has transitioned to contemporary art, where she explores figuration through the lens of culinary imagery, hands, and portraiture. Her works often emerge from everyday moments, yet her emphasis on darker tonalities introduces psychological complexity. This tension between domestic intimacy and broader human themes positions her practice within current dialogues on embodiment and the quotidian in art.

Curatorial Intent

In bringing these three practices together, Echoes seeks to highlight how diverse mediums and approaches—textiles, abstraction, figuration—can operate in harmony while retaining their distinct voices. Rather than dissolving difference, the exhibition amplifies it, allowing each artist’s work to echo through the others. The result is a multi-sensory environment where the viewer is invited to consider resonance as both a formal and conceptual device.