Lucinda Button/ The Sea of Emotions

Lucinda Button is a graduate of Wimbledon School of Art (1992) and Glasgow School of Art (1995), where she specialised in Embroidered and Woven Textiles. After a brief period working as a designer, she realised a strong urge to explore the world more widely. This led to a varied early career as a freelance broadcast journalist, producer, and actress. Eventually, she settled in Sussex to start a family and, in 2004, began a new chapter as a secondary art teacher.

Following a long break from her textile practice, Lucinda recently reconnected with her creative roots and has since worked intensively, reclaiming every spare moment to produce new work. Creativity has always been central to her life, enriched by a broad experience of travel, which continues to inform her practice. A lifelong environmentalist, she is now using her textiles as a platform for communication, activism, and reflection, fuelled by a strong sense of purpose and urgency.

Her New Horizons series marks a return to textiles and represents a deeply personal exploration of emotion through the motif of the sea. In this work, Lucinda examines how the ocean’s portrayal can convey emotional states while simultaneously calling attention to the environmental crisis facing our marine ecosystems. By integrating natural and synthetic sea detritus, she encourages viewers to stop, reflect, and truly “see” the sea. She aims to inspire awareness and hope—to suggest that although time is running out, there is still a possibility to “turn the tide” and restore our relationship with the oceans.

The New Horizons series formed the heart of her first central London exhibition, The Poetics of Space, in 2024. The pieces, developed over a summer of creative intensity, drew on fabrics already collected and long-formed ideas rooted in her artistic philosophy. With over two decades of experience teaching art and textiles, Lucinda brings to her work a deep, instinctive understanding of composition, colour, and 20th-century visual language.

Her practice blends traditional textile techniques with a contemporary environmental consciousness. Found sea detritus—both natural and manmade—is stitched into repurposed fabrics: old garments, outdated swatch books, and industrial leftovers. These materials are dyed, printed, layered, and embroidered by hand. Each piece becomes a quiet act of transformation, finding beauty and meaning in what has been discarded. While the damage inflicted on the marine environment is a driving concern, Lucinda’s work seeks not to accuse but to educate, offering visual poetry as a vehicle for reflection.

The urgency behind her creative resurgence was born from personal trauma. In 2023, Lucinda’s youngest son nearly died and underwent an emergency liver transplant. While caring for him during his recovery, she faced the emotional fallout of the experience and the ongoing uncertainty around its cause. Creating work during this period became a form of therapy—each stitch a moment of grounding and healing. The resulting sea-inspired pieces serve as both personal catharsis and environmental testimony: a “sea of emotion” embodied in textile form.

In 2024, Lucinda began a new body of work titled Landworks, a natural evolution from her sea-focused series. This time, the materials include land-based detritus, gathered over years, and arranged into compositions that explore different colour palettes and conceptual pathways. The process has opened up new avenues for thought and artistic investigation.

Lucinda's work has been included in several recent exhibitions, including Palette & Palate in Ireland (focusing on food and our relationship with the land), The Green Exhibition (connecting art and environment), Plant Postcards, Stitch by Stitch, and Art as a Response to Mental Health. One of her sea-inspired pieces was also selected for Under the Sea, a global virtual exhibition connected to the UN Decade of Ocean Science—making her the only UK-based artist included.

Collaboration has become an important part of her evolving practice. She is currently working with a scientist researching kelp regeneration, resulting in new pieces—Bournemouth Battles and Kelp Cries—for her developing Second Sea series. As someone who frequently travels to remote coastlines, Lucinda often takes the opportunity to clean these areas. The found debris is then incorporated into her work, woven and stitched into forms that highlight the scale of the ocean’s pollution crisis.

Her upcoming projects include a high-profile collaboration with a European fashion design team focused on sustainable production. Lucinda has been commissioned to produce four large textile installations for a catwalk show on a luxury yacht in New York in September 2025. Returning to the palette of blues and greens has been both a technical and emotional journey, reflecting how her artistic voice has evolved while remaining tethered to the sea—her enduring muse and emotional anchor.

Through it all, Lucinda continues to learn and grow. As a teacher, she values the importance of an open, evolving practice. She regularly attends workshops in painting, printing, and textile processes, staying engaged with both traditional craft and contemporary innovation. Her work remains rooted in transformation—of materials, of meaning, and of emotion—always with the quiet aim of drawing attention to the fragility and wonder of the world we inhabit.