Entering Darcey Fleming’s kaleidoscopic, twine-filled studio feels like disappearing down an Alice in Wonderland-esque rabbit hole – part farmyard fever dream, part acid trip. “Sometimes the smell can be quite overwhelming,” says the 25-year-old artist, of the earthy aroma of straw that hangs in the air. It’s a reminder of the smallholdings in West Berkshire and Oxfordshire, where Fleming sources the twine – originally destined to tie hay and straw bales together, that is intrinsic to her practice. Impossible-not-to-touch woven panels cover the walls, and rainbow-hued reupholstered chairs take up space on the spaghetti-like floor of the cosy studio space at the Sarabande Foundation in Tottenham, where Fleming has just wrapped up a three-year residency.
“I don’t make the chairs as functional objects,” she says. Utilitarian or not, they caught the eye of Givenchy’s Sarah Burton after Fleming exhibited a searing yellow chair at Selfridges in the spring of 2025. Now 24 of Fleming’s colourful artworks sit in Givenchy shops around the world.
In truth, tendrils of twine appear to follow Fleming – to the point they’ve almost become an extension of herself. When the former under-17 hurdler for England encountered a period of illness in her teens, causing her to leave school and hole herself up in her remote West Berkshire home, as a way to keep busy, she began collecting detrital twine from the fields around her, using a self-developed weaving practice to transform them into abstract woven forms, or “skins”. She would then bind these “skins” around objects in her bedroom, like chairs. “I even covered myself,” says Fleming, who finds stray pieces of the frayed twine in her hair and sleeps on an inflatable mattress in case the panels she obsessively works on at night call for emergency floor space. “I’ve rented a big barn, with help from my great uncle Ray Clark, for my new studio in an attempt to get my work out of my bedroom.”
Darcey Fleming with one of her creations.
She has a parent-preferred educational route – a BSc and a master’s – to thank for her design rigour, and likens the relentless repetition to the “drills and routines of athletics”. But her work flourishes spontaneously, according to the deadstock twine Fleming finds: she has no choice regarding its colour, which can vary according to the season and the farms it comes from.
Now she’s about to make a pilgrimage to see her latest work at Givenchy’s Soho store in New York. You’ll recognise her suitcase by the twine spilling from it.
