Using collage and crochet, artist and writer Mikaela Castledine weaves beautiful stories to create amazing works of art. Well-known for creating crocheted animal sculptures, her latest collection of work ‘Heirloom’ honours the debt she owes to her near and far ancestors. Heirloom, she says is about memory, genetic legacy and family lore. She believes crochet is a thoughtful and meditative process that also encourages deep focus.
While much of her work revolves around the nexus between humans and animals, she has also created some fascinating architectural forms, particularly the architecture of religious buildings which she says are interesting in their own way. Her intricate aerial landscapes form the architecture for stories, the places she says where stories live and memories reside. Born into a family of artists and craftsmen, Mikaela informs her father, a farmer and an engineer began making spinning wheels for a living in the seventies and together with her mother gave her and her siblings, a blueprint for creative living. Her Burmese connection too has been intricately carried in the work she makes.
“Growing up in a house where every possible craft and art medium was available for us to play with may seem an ideal spring board for becoming an artist but my mother, having survived a difficult wartime childhood in Burma and a dislocating migrant upheaval, was determined that we should have the safety of a proper job,” she shares continuing that her degrees in Biology, Interior Design and more M.A. in writing and literature have helped her well in life but also in her art practise too.