Boston-based textile artist David Nott creates hand-tufted wall art that has captured the attention of some of the world’s luxury brands, from Burberry to IWC Schaffhausen
I’ve always been led by a compulsion to create. In the beginning, I didn’t really mind where that would take me; I just wanted to be creative.
I studied art and design at college and my first step into the art world was through dotwork, which involves building pictures using small black dots [a form of pointillism]. It helped me understand contrast and composition, but it didn’t teach me about colour theory, which is something I really wanted to jump into. That’s why, four years ago, I began to experiment with textiles, and in particular with hand-tufted art.
I describe what I do as being at the intersection between painting and sculpture. I create tactile, dimensional pieces and that early discipline of dotwork still informs what I do today, especially in how I build structure, depth and contrast.
Each piece starts with a sketch or a design on Adobe Illustrator, or sometimes it will start with a single word. Once I have a finalised concept, I’ll get my yarn and a rack and use a tufting gun to build up the design in horizontal lines. Between each line, I sculpt the fabric down with razors. On average, a piece will take between 50 and 80 hours to create, but sometimes the sculpting and refining part can feel endless.
I’m less focused on making a statement with what I do than I am in evoking a feeling. My work is playful, intuitive and really rooted in exploration. Dopamine [left] from my Brain Chemistry series felt like a breakthrough piece; it encapsulates the core of what I do. I was searching for a visual expression of the feelgood hormone and trying to give form to something invisible but very powerful that, especially in the modern age, guides the way our brains and attention spans work.
I recently completed a commission for IWC Schaffhausen’s new store in Edinburgh, which involved making a textile interpretation of one of the watchmaker’s most iconic designs. It’s really a celebration of precision and craftsmanship that is so fundamental to the brand and to what I do. It felt like a natural fit.
Right now, I’m developing a new series called Monochrome. It’s a collection of eight pieces, each centred around a single colour using six to eight tonal variations. I definitely lean towards certain colour palettes and often gravitate to shades of blue, so the goal of this series is to take me out of that and experiment with different colourways. I’m starting with yellow, which I’m very excited about.
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