Perhaps you can stitch, draw, and finish a piece. But you keep reaching for the same techniques, tempted to give up rather than sit with not knowing.
Whether you've stitched for years or you're just finding your way with a needle and thread, this online art course will help you find the story only you can tell.
Richard McVetis has spent twenty years turning slowness into a way of thinking. His hand-stitched work maps coal seams and his family's mining history, one deliberate mark at a time. Here, he shares that process – not techniques to copy, but a way of finding what your own materials, history and instincts are trying to tell you.
This isn't a course about learning new stitches. Take a two-hour colour walk until you notice things you'd normally miss. Push one material as far as it will go – fold it, burn it, bury it, scale it up – and see what a finished piece never reveals. Follow a single word into three unrelated fields until it leads you somewhere your materials already know. It's the same process behind Richard's own work, now held by the V&A.
Across five stages – looking, digging, making, connecting and articulating – you'll dig into what drives your work, using making itself to think, not just execute. Finish with the confidence and language to call yourself an artist, and mean it.
There's no pressure to arrive with a finished idea. Richard starts small: a drawing exercise, a timed stitch, a slow walk.
Learn how to make, and know why you're making it.
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