Richard McVetis

McVetis works in hand-stitch and drawing, building forms through accumulated repetition — the same mark made thousands of times, each subtly different from the last. His work maps time rather than illustrates it: the slow accumulation of thread becomes a record of duration, attention, and labour. These concerns have a personal root in his family's mining heritage, where the body's work left its mark in material — an inheritance he traces through his own meticulous making. Underlying everything is a curiosity about deep time: geological, cosmological, and human.

Read the story 'Labour of Love'.

“In the use of repeating patterns that record and reveal the process of making, there is an affinity, too, with composer Steve Reich. As McVetis puts it, “Even though I am doing the same stitch over and over again […] there’s a rhythm, a flow that changes across each cube.” It is an approach that echoes Reich’s phase-shifting technique where, as a repeated phrase is perceptibly altered over time, the compositional process is rendered discernible in the music itself”

Annie Warburton

"McVetis' research explores ideas of repetition and expressions of sameness and difference within repetition. His vision communicates an enquiry into this process and lends the work a quiet, focused, contemplative feeling”.

Dr Emma Neuberg