Amanda Cobbett: Emrboidered Nature

To look at Amanda Cobbett's work is to be transported deep into the heart of the forest. Tiny mushrooms spring from the stalks of decomposing leaves. Twigs and bark, both windfallen and living, are tufted, crusted and cushioned with mosaics of lichens and mosses of astonishing variety. Fleshy toadstools capture the eye with their bright colours and strange forms - closer inspection revealing their delicate gills, a nibbled stalk, and the mycelium threads or hyphae that both form their fruiting bodies and connect them together in networks that we are only just beginning to understand.

Although at first glance the pieces look entirely real, they are in fact embroideries, composed of hundreds upon hundreds of threads (most apt considering their subject), painstakingly worked and reworked into their final forms.

This book catalogues the collection of 26 works of art commissioned by Richard Scott, 10th Duke of Buccleuch, based on the four Buccleuch seats: Bowhill, Drumlanrig and Dalkeith Palace in Scotland and Boughton House in Northamptonshire. It covers Amanda's approach and methods, as well as some of her original watercolors and photographs, combined with Andrew Montgomery's astonishingly precise photographs of her final sculptures.