Skin, cloth, needles, text, ink, printing, stitching, folding: these elemental materials and actions form the bedrock of Poppy Nash’s artistic practice. Poppy draws upon her years of experience as an artist-printmaker to create works in which the flatness and hardness of the printed word becomes intimately entwined with textile’s softness and pliancy. Across her work, Poppy activates the potential of textile and tactile materiality to mitigate oppressive circumstances; whether through research-based projects that look back to historical subversive craft practices, or in the creation of objects to enrich and soften environments providing public care.
Poppy often uses a digital embroidery machine to manipulate her fabric, resulting in images that glitch in and out of legibility. She embraces this obscurity as a material echo of the way memory can be shaped and distorted: like wayward neural pathways, threads fray, break, and are sutured back together. As a result of her own experience with chronic illness, Poppy’s awareness of the ways technology and the body can be enmeshed stretches beyond metaphor. In her physical interventions into the algorithmic programming of the embroidery machine, Poppy explores the regulation, disruption, and potential for rebellion latent in both handcraft and digital technology.
In her own words, Poppy works to “bridge archival inquiry with material experimentation,” digesting fragments from historic collections and sharing her findings through public engagement. In doing so, she advocates for an intimate, personal relationship to bodies of information that can otherwise seem remote or inaccessible. The presence of embodied narratives of sickness and health in these collections is of particular interest to Poppy. She entangles the stories she finds with her personal understanding of illness and disability, and inscribes the resultant twist of transhistorical voices onto luxuriant textile assemblages.
Poppy Nash lives and works in Glasgow. Current and upcoming projects include Murmurations, (2025), a collaboration with charities Strange Field and PEEK; Shelter (2025-2026), a group exhibition organised by Outside-In, showing at The New Art Gallery Walsall and Christies, London; and a solo exhibition at Patriot Hall Gallery, Edinburgh (2025). Work emerging from Poppy’s Disobedient Textiles project formed the basis of a recent solo exhibition at Glasshouse (Gathering, London, 2025). Other solo presentations of Poppy’s work include The Art of Dying (The Wellcome Collection, London, 2019), The Art of Dying 2.0 (Walpole Bay Hotel, Margate, 2022), and Care (Review Gallery, Cove Park, 2019). Poppy’s work has featured in group exhibitions at Cornell University; Hauser and Wirth; Site Gallery, Sheffield; and The Grundy, Blackpool, among others.
Poppy’s permanent artworks include The Welcome Room at Sandwell CAMHS in collaboration with Hospital Rooms; a public art intervention at the Boghall Community Centre commissioned by West Lothian Council; and Disability Rights! Are Human Rights!, one of three commissions for the National Disability Arts Collection & Archive. Public and community engagement sits at the heart of Poppy’s practice, and she has given talks and led workshops with organisations including the Wellcome Collection, Tate Modern, Tramway, the Govan Women’s Group, Red Cross Youth Life Skills Program, and Shape Arts.
Poppy Nash: poppy@poppynash.com
Artist assistant, Millie Collins: info@poppynash.com.
Studio manager, Molly Mae Whawell: studio@poppynash.com.