Featured: Tremough Tartan by Liz Tomes
Liz Tomes – Guild Graduate in 2025 – takes an exploratory approach
Liz Tomes is a textile designer whose practice explores the intersections of material, language, and touch. Working across embroidery, weave, and print, she translates conceptual research into expressive, tactile textiles that invite connection through surface and structure. Her work reveals how colour and material can communicate emotion, memory, and meaning — creating pieces that reward both curiosity and contemplation.
“The journey feels circular — a return to my first love of textiles. Completing my degree on the same site where I went to school more than two decades ago has given that return a quiet symmetry. Time has altered both place and perspective, yet the pull of material, process, and enquiry remains constant — familiar yet transformed, like the cloths I create.”
I approach my practice through conceptual enquiry, driven by a voracious curiosity and a compulsion to explore process. Working across digital and hand embroidery, weave, and print, I allow the concept to lead the making — letting materiality and colour nuances emerge through investigation rather than prescription. Drawing inspiration from language, history, and human connection, I explore how tactility unites us — revealing the language, resonance, and power of material in a continual quest to make it meaningful.
Across my recent collections, I explore communication and sensory experience through three interconnected projects — Auspicious Haptics, Suspended in Time, and Convergent Frequencies. Each examines how meaning can be translated through material: from the coded tactility of touch, to the layered temporality of woven memory, to the rhythm and resonance of colour. Together, they form a study in how textiles speak — through surface, structure, and the human instinct to connect.
My practice sits between concept and touch, research and intuition. Each work begins as an enquiry and evolves through making — a dialogue between thought and material that values instinct as much as structure. Fabric becomes both subject and language, absorbing gesture and retaining traces of care, time, and experimentation. Through this process, I aim to create textiles that invite closeness and reward attention, asking the viewer to see through touch and to feel through sight.
Auspicious Haptics
Auspicious Haptics explores the intersection of touch and sight — the pleasure of feeling and the fortune of seeing. The project reflects on the physical and emotional value of reading and on how heightened awareness of touch can deepen empathy and presence.
Inspired by Braille, not as ornament but as structure and code, I translate this tactile writing system into woven and embroidered surfaces. Some pieces include readable Braille; others embed private messages in rhythmic, coded formations. Seen from afar, they appear as patterned cloth; on closer engagement, they reveal hidden depth.
There is an irony in their visibility — they are first seen, yet they invite touch. Each work encourages a moment of empathy and awareness, reminding us that understanding can begin in the hand as much as in the eye. Auspicious Haptics has since become the namesake of my practice — an ongoing philosophy that celebrates the intimacy and generosity of material communication.
Suspended in Time
Suspended in Time considers how material can hold memory. Informed by seventeenth-century Vanitas painting and the poetry of the Cavalier writers, the collection explores how stillness captures both vitality and transience — a meditation on the passing of time and the preservation of beauty.
Through woven construction and embroidery, I seek to express the delicate tension between what endures and what fades. Unusual colour pairings create harmony from contrast, striking a balance between the old and the new — between tradition and reinvention. The collection plays with rhythm, structure, and tone to evoke a sense of time suspended: material that feels at once familiar and renewed, refined yet quietly defiant.
Convergent Frequencies
Convergent Frequencies investigates the resonance of colour and pattern — how rhythm and repetition can behave like sound. Drawing on synaesthetic experience, I examine the point where visual and auditory perception converge, allowing colour to vibrate as emotion and pattern to function as rhythm.
The collection takes influence from tartan, houndstooth, and my Hungarian heritage, merging digital embroidery and print on deadstock textiles. A spontaneous photograph of embroidery threads strewn across my studio table became the foundation for the collection’s central motif — a visual system of order and dissonance that reflects the layered frequencies of both thought and sound.
Acknowledgment
My time at Falmouth University’s Fashion & Textile Institute has been nothing short of transformative — a thriving, forward-thinking environment that fosters innovation, collaboration, and integrity in practice. The lecturers and technicians are intelligent, relevant, and generous with both their knowledge and encouragement, creating a space where ideas are challenged and nurtured in equal measure. The sense of community and cross-disciplinary dialogue with fashion and costume students has been beyond inspiring. I would undertake this degree again without hesitation.
Across my work, I continue to explore communication — through texture, colour, and human touch. Whether weaving the coded tactility of Auspicious Haptics, balancing history and renewal in Suspended in Time, or mapping rhythm and emotion in Convergent Frequencies, I see my textiles as translations of experience: layered, resonant, and alive to the senses.
I see textiles as living forms — capable of remembering, adapting, and renewing. My work now turns toward circular textiles, exploring how deconstruction and reconstruction can sustain both material and meaning.
All work featured by Liz Tomes