Textile Artist
& Designer
Jilli Blackwood has been a practising abstract artist over many decades, honing her art of painting with textile colour. Working with only hand-dyed natural fabrics, she uses a variety of unconventional embroidery techniques to create highly textured works with which she seeks to evoke reaction within the viewer.
Over the years, her textile art has taken her on a remarkable journey around the world from Montecito in California to Delhi in India, stopping off in Europe and Kuwait City along the way. She has worked on many design projects including the creation of bespoke fabrics for couture and interior designers, costume design for high profile sporting events and art for enriching public buildings.
Jilli is ceaseless in the development of her creative practice and recently she has been pairing oil paint with her “slash and show” embroidery style to create texturized oil paintings. In May 2024, one such piece (‘Ebb’) was selected by the Royal Scottish Academy for their 198th Annual Exhibition of contemporary art and architecture.
Internationally renowned artist, Jilli Blackwood, graduated from The Glasgow School of Art with a First Class BA Honours specialising in embroidered and woven textiles.
Her unique style, an embroidery technique she describes as ’slash and show’, has garnered global recognition with her textile art held in museum, corporate, public and private art collections, including: The United States Government, The Scottish Government, National Museums Scotland and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, among others. She has exhibited in both group and solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Kuwait City, Tokyo and across Canada, and the United Kingdom.
Jilli is best known for her Millennium Kilt series which was exhibited in Andrew Bolton’s ‘Men in Skirts’ exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. This series was the inspiration behind her first appearance on a global stage as Director of Costume for The Flag Handover Ceremony at the 2010 Commonwealth Games, Delhi. She designed contemporary embroidered red tartan outfits for 350 cast members, two of whom wore bespoke Jilli Blackwood outfits, based upon regimental ceremonial dress, and which included Millennium Kilts.
In 2014, she was commissioned to dress Team Scotland athletes for the Opening Ceremony of the Commonwealth Games held in Glasgow, producing outfits and a unique woven tartan designed to capture the intensity and spirit of Team Scotland.
At the same time, Jilli was commissioned by the World Anti Doping Agency to design a bespoke, printed tartan using their corporate colours to highlight their presence at the Athletes’ Village during the 2014 Games. This branding was rolled out across numerous small gifts and mementos to commemorate individuals’ involvement at the Games and to educate the athletes about doping.
Jilli’s designs have helped to communicate a number of strong messages and have left a lasting impact on those who have encountered them, including a major project for Heathrow Airport in 2015 celebrating the impact of Scottish inventors on aviation.
The application of Jilli’s designs is universal, with the luxury market drawn to her striking artwork. A textile hangs in the Fairmont Hotel in St Andrews, Scotland, and in 2022, to add to their existing collection of Jilli’s work, Firmdale Hotels bought an embroidered tryptic entitled “Caithness” for their new hotel in Warren Street, New York City.
Since 2020, an exciting new body of work has been developed; it is a blend of Jilli’s ’slash and show’ technique with her trademark use of colour, this time in oil paint, to transform the canvas into highly textural paintings. Her painting style, like her textiles, is based around the abstract, creating mood, emotion and atmosphere by pairing oil paint, stitch and texture, whilst drawing inspiration from the world outside as well as her inner world.
Jilli is a lively and engaging artist who is highly sought after as a guest lecturer and speaker in the United Kingdom and abroad. Notable engagements include: The Glasgow School of Art; Friends of the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A), London; the applied art fair SOFA in Chicago, USA; the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) Craft Show, USA and Kuwait’s National Gallery. In February 2016, she was the invited guest artist at the “Design Outside the Lines” Retreat in Montecito, California. In November 2024, the Caledonian Club in Belgravia, London is hosting the debut solo exhibition of Jilli’s new collection of paintings alongside a small selection of her textile art.
In addition, Jilli offers creative workshops on a number of themes including, but not limited to: ‘Fibre Bead Making’, ‘The Remarkable Thread’, ‘Recycling and Reimagining’ and ‘Colour’.
Jilli’s work has been featured in many magazines including: Vogue, Elle Decoration, Selvedge Magazine, House and Garden, Homes and Gardens, Craft Arts International and the Embroiderers’ Guild “embroidery” magazine, among other mainstream media titles. She has appeared on TV on the BBC, STV and BBC Radio, talking about her work and critiquing that of others.
Sustainability is at the core of Jill’s work, no fibre is wasted in her studio, everything is recycled and re-imagined to create works of art, be that a stitched oil painting, a piece of art to wear or an intricate textile wall hanging.
