Kate Box

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Cloth and clay 2024

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Kate Box is a textile designer maker, passionate about blending contemporary design with traditional craft. Following a career in the fashion industry, she started her own textile design practice in 2015. 

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Working from her home-studio in the South Downs National Park, she began her independent practice designing knitwear on a range of domestic knitting machines. Colour was, and is, the driving force behind all her work and experimenting with hues, tones and combinations of colours has been a fascination since studying at the Royal College of Art (2000-2002). She works with lambswool and linen both highly-versatile, renewable fibres which respond well to the natural dyes of plants native to the UK. 

After becoming increasingly frustrated with the static, restrictive nature of the domestic knitting machine, Kate, who admits she is not a technical knitter, prefers to use the machine to fabricate a cloth more akin to a painting. Using methods such as ‘plating’, (layering one colour of yarn over another), and Swiss darning, (the hand embroidery technique traditionally used to mend knitwear), she has found she can create a more painterly textile with depth, movement, and the mark of the maker. 

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