‘One Man and His Needle’

A Decade of Wool Art from the Western Isles

Retrospective Exhibition with Current Works

6-16 December 2023

Artist's Preview Tue 5th December 6-8pm

at Robert Young Antiques  

 Tom Hickman lives and works alone in his croft on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. He has no mobile phone, television, tablet or wifi. He is self-taught and claims that he started taking his art seriously in the mid-1980s, then saying that since he moved to the Hebrides in 2005 his work “has become heavily influenced by wool, from the sheep on the croft to the myriad of coloured yarn used in the fabrication of Harris Tweed” and recently wrote “Naïve, primitive, amateur, provincial, self-taught, non-academic; stylistically there is no one term that satisfactorily describes my stictching”. 

The works are a created with a unique blend of fabric collage backgrounds, invariably fashioned from scrap pieces of locally woven Harris Tweed, on which he then embroiders naïve landscape and figurative details. These works are immediately compelling, the bold images emerging from a riot of textures and colours excecuted in a variety of stitching techniques. 

We will be showing a significant body of restrospective works from the last 10 years as well as more recent works 

As a self taught artist I have followed my impulse to create the whimsical, embellish the practical, record the visual and express the emotional.

  Please CLICK HERE to view the Catalogue