Amber Lily is a contemporary textile artist whose practice centres on colour, texture, and mark-making, creating abstract textile works rooted in everyday experience. Her work draws inspiration from often-overlooked details such as litter, graffiti, scuffed surfaces, and urban plant life. Through close observation and photography, she responds to the environments she moves through, translating these encounters into layered textile compositions that reflect a strong sense of place.
Sustainability plays a central role in Amber’s practice. She works primarily with recycled and repurposed materials, including discarded clothing, domestic textiles such as bedsheets, remnants from previous projects, fabric shop offcuts, plastic packaging, and salvaged materials such as car airbags. These materials bring their own histories into the work - traces of previous use, function, and wear - which become integral to each piece. By incorporating materials with existing stories, Amber creates work that reflects both personal and collective experiences, reinforcing a connection between material, process, and environment.
Her approach is experimental and intuitive, combining dyeing, printmaking, collage, and free-motion embroidery. Techniques such as screen printing, gelli plate printing, quilting, and drawing are layered through a process of exploration and play. Colour studies and palette development guide her compositions, with decisions driven by feeling, rhythm, and proportion rather than fixed outcomes. Music and repetition often shape the making process, allowing the work to develop slowly and meditatively.
Amber’s work takes the form of wall hangings, framed pieces, and sculptural or stretched textile artworks that reinterpret traditional quilting through a contemporary lens. She values accessibility, originality, and the wellbeing that comes from making, both within her own practice and through workshops that encourage creative confidence.
Through her work, Amber invites viewers to slow down, look closer, and reconsider their surroundings. Her textiles encourage an appreciation of the everyday, offering colour, texture, and material-led narratives that celebrate process, place, and the experience of making.
