£1.000.00
Sara Impey is a self-taught textile artist specialising in quilting techniques. She exhibits nationally and internationally and has work in the collections of the V&A Museum in London, the Museum of Arts & Design in New York, the International Quilt Museum in Nebraska and The Quilters’ Guild in the UK. In 2025 she had a solo show at the Festival of Quilts at the NEC, Birmingham, and in early 2026 exhibited at the show “Textile Art Redefined” at the Saatchi Gallery. She is a member of the pan-European exhibiting group QuiltArt and exhibits by invitation with the Blackwater Polytechnic art collective.
For the last twenty years Impey’s work has featured lettering, achieved by free-motion machine embroidery. This is a painstaking process but gives her the freedom to compose the text as she is stitching it so that the words go straight from her brain to her needle. A former newspaper journalist, Impey likes to use the textile surface to comment on contemporary issues. She is particularly interested in how language in public life can be used to persuade, to manipulate and sometimes to mislead. Another recent theme is the effect of information overload and cognitive dissonance.
Sara Impey, Legacy, 2017
96 x 125 cm, Hand-dyed cotton, wholecloth, free-motion machine stitched, machine quilted.
In Legacy (2017), Sara Impey explores textile tradition, memory and inheritance. Drawing on the history of handwork and lace-making in Essex, the piece considers how skills, stories and identities are passed from one generation to the next. Through stitched text, Impey turns cloth into both a material object and a record of cultural memory.
