Toni mostly uses her practical skills to create beautiful and useful everyday textiles.  Here, however, she offers a meditation on the mental and physical wanderings we all share as humans.

 This series of works was born from the confluence of several ideas and processes, some consciously chosen, some less so.  The seed of this collection was the phenomenon of desire paths; the idea that in any built or rural environment, you can lay and designate all the pathways you want, but humans (and other creatures) will inevitably mark out their own paths, those that serve them best in the tasks they need to accomplish, and that allow them to access the physical and psychological spaces they want or need to be.  In the same way that water will find its own way through a landscape by a combination of the path of least resistance, and slowly carving away the obstacles in its path, so do we.  Another aspect was a desire to explore the ways in which different yarns interact with different lighting environments.  Using both manmade and natural yarns and fibres, I hoped to create a series of pieces that would produce subtly different effects in natural and manmade lighting, low and high, day and night, thus giving each piece a life beyond first impressions.  This aspect of the work is a gesture towards the fact that the people collectively making the desire paths, one footstep at a time, contain more than the first impression they present to the world, and those things are not always apparent in every circumstance.