The new MA Craft & Material Practices lecturer is a QEST Craft Scholar who has shown at Collect, holds a studio at Cockpit and is undertaking doctoral research at the Royal College of Art.
Award-winning textile artist, writer and educator Suzanna James has joined Arts University Plymouth as a Lecturer on MA Craft & Material Practices.
Suzanna makes intricate, lace-like work by drawing threads from woven cloth and stitching into the spaces left behind. Words can sit almost out of sight within the finished surface. The method is painstaking, but the questions behind it are large: what is absent, what gets remembered and whether making can become an act of care or repair.
Her work was shown at Collect 2025 at Somerset House, and she is a studio holder at Cockpit Bloomsbury in London. She is also undertaking doctoral study at the Royal College of Art (RCA), where her research is based in the School of Arts & Humanities’ Health and Care Research Cluster.
Suzanna completed an MA in Textiles at the RCA in 2022, supported by scholarships from QEST and the Coats Foundation Bursary Trust, as well as an MA award from the Worshipful Company of Framework Knitters. Her dissertation, Caring Cloth, was awarded a distinction and selected to represent Textiles at the RCA’s Critical and Historical Studies Symposium.
The research developed from years of practice across textiles, writing, photography, film and collaborative work. An earlier project supported by Wales Arts International took Suzanna to Peru, where she worked with Awamaki and women-led textile cooperatives concerned with preserving knowledge of drop-spindle spinning.
In 2024, Suzanna undertook an Artistic Research Fellowship at the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design (KMD), University of Bergen. There she exhibited and co-curated KMD: Textiles at Tekstilindustrimuseet in Salhus. A Textile Society of America Student and New Professional Scholarship also supported her presentation at the Society’s 2024 symposium. Her contribution, Caring Cloth Praxis: Ethics of Loss, Practices of Remembering, was published in the symposium proceedings, followed in 2025 by her essay Tender as Needlework: Remembering Through Cloth and Care. She was a winner of a Wynn Newhouse Award in 2025.
Suzanna began her teaching career at Carmarthen School of Art, returning to the local art school in her home county of Carmarthenshire where she had completed her Foundation Diploma in Art and Design. She later taught MA Sustainable Textiles at Falmouth University, textiles and fine art at Cardiff Metropolitan University, and BA Textiles at Winchester School of Art. She also mentors young people through Arts Emergency, the charity that helps underrepresented young people to access opportunities in the creative industties.
Suzanna said: “I have felt drawn to Arts University Plymouth for several years, following firstly my understanding of the focus on an interdisciplinary approach to craft and material practices, and crucially, the facilities to support the development of these practices. My research is connected to memory and preservation, and I’m particularly interested in the ways in which heritage craft skills can be preserved or restored, so teaching on a programme that can still support this rigorously is really important to me.
It has already been an incredible experience to work with the recent graduating cohort, who were working with reimagining glassblowing techniques, alongside beautiful innovations of wood turning and hand-built ceramics and a focus on regenerative materials through the majority of student practices. I hope that through the collaborative nature of care-led pedagogies, that myself and the students I work with continue to increase our understanding of the ways that material practices pave the path ahead for real-life contexts of social and ecological repair.”
MA Craft & Material Practices gives artists, designers and makers time to deepen an existing practice or take it somewhere new. Students can work in clay, glass, wood, biomaterials, metals, fibre and other media, using specialist workshops and digital fabrication through Fab Lab South West. They join students from other MA courses for critiques, seminars, research intensives, lectures and site visits, while retaining focused support for their own material enquiry.
Professor Stephanie Owens, Executive Dean and Associate Pro-Vice-Chancellor at Arts University Plymouth, said: “Suzanna pays very close attention to how things are made, but she never treats technique as an end in itself. A pulled thread can become a way to talk about memory, care and loss. Situating material skill within critical discourse is a valuable part of what Suzanna brings to our postgraduate students as a creative scholar.
“MA Craft & Material Practices is deliberately open. It is not built around one material or one fixed idea of what craft should be. Suzanna has worked across textiles, fine art and research, and she knows how much can happen when those areas meet. We’re very pleased she has joined our academic community.”
Suzanna is due to present her research at Making Futures™ 2026, Arts University Plymouth’s international conference for contemporary craft and material practice. Feeling Materials – Care, Reciprocity & Responsive Matter runs from 29 to 31 October 2026 and will explore many of the questions about care, repair and material agency that shape her work.
Suzanna is also co-author of a forthcoming chapter on place-based postgraduate learning, co-creation and more-than-human perspectives for No Limits to Hope: Transforming Learning for Better Futures, an international project from the Club of Rome’s Fifth Element programme and the World Environmental Education Congress Network.
Arts University Plymouth, founded in 1856, has been named Arts University of the Year in the Daily Mail University Guide 2027. Find out more about MA Craft & Material Practices.
