How to start a new artistic career in your Sixties

Alison Johnston creating in her workroom. | Pete Harper Photography

Colour fills Alison Johnston’s small Edinburgh flat, from fabric samples and works in progress to boxes of threads and reels of embroidery cotton. A handwritten sign next to her sewing table bears just one word: “intricate”.

And her works are intricate, as well as large, bold and colourful. You have to look at each one at least twice: once to take in the design and the play of colours, fabrics and shades, and then again to see the detail in the hand and machine embroidery.

Alison’s first exhibition as a textile artist has just opened at the Dundas Street Gallery, Edinburgh, proof that you can start a new artistic career in your sixties. Overcoming barriers is nothing new to Alison, who has been a knitwear designer and entrepreneur, a clinical support worker and art therapist, all despite the fact that she was born severely deaf. This is just the latest chapter in her adventure.

“I turned 60 in 2020 and I just thought ‘Life’s too short’,” she says. “I’ve always wanted to do this full-time. I’ve enjoyed all the things I’ve done, but I’ve always known I would do this one day. I think all the experience I’ve picked up from the journey of my life has given me the confidence to do it now. This is the right time.”

Alison was born in Galashiels and is proud of the fact that she is the fifth generation of her family to work in the textile industry. “As a child I was always painting, drawing and making things,” she says. “It helped to develop focus, which is so vital when you’re deaf. I used to love going to my grandfather’s mill because I could feel the rhythm of the looms in my body.”

In her twenties, she enrolled at the Scottish College of Textiles in Galashiels for a three-year course in knitwear design. After graduating, she applied for a bank loan to start her own business, Alison Johnston Knitwear. “I went to see the bank manager with big bags of jumpers and cardigans and piled them all up on his desk. I don’t know what he was thinking, but I got the loan!” Her knitwear designs were stocked by Jenners, and by other shops and catalogue retailers.

When a recession caused her to wind up the business, she worked as a clinical support worker in Edinburgh hospitals but, always looking for an outlet for her creativity, she started working with paint, collage and mixed media, selling her work on the railings on the Mound during the Edinburgh Festivals. “They were long days, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. I sold work to people from all over the world.”

Then, while working at St Columba’s Hospice in 2007, she met a nurse who was training to be an art therapist. “As soon as I heard the word ‘art’ I wanted to do it,” she says. “So I went and jumped in the deep end and applied. My motto is you either sink or swim. I think if it had been slowly explained to me I might have pulled out!”

During the two-year course at Queen Margaret University, she gained experience working with young children with additional support needs and adults with challenging behaviours, then she spent a decade working as an art therapist with adults with profound and complex disabilities, and later those with dementia.

“It was very rewarding and very challenging,” she says. “A lot of the people I worked with were not able to communicate well verbally. But I’ve had a lot of challenges adapting to the hearing world myself. I think my deafness gave me a kind of sixth sense, I could be more attuned to the person and sense what they were trying to communicate.

“I’m grateful for that time because it taught me a lot about myself and it taught me patience. Before that, I used to be so hard on myself if a work wasn’t going the way I wanted it to. Now I see every work as a journey and go the flow. I find it much healthier to work that way.”

Having decided to stop work the previous year, Alison took a trip of a lifetime to Mexico in early 2020 to see the home of her heroine Frida Kahlo, arriving home just as lockdown was beginning. Having picked up a bag of colourful new materials in a Mexican fabric store, she was in no doubt about how she wanted to spend the long days at home.

“Having not touched my sewing machine for 20 years, I had already made one big textile piece, Fields of Gold, for a small exhibition. I started with some little scraps of fabric and it grew and grew. When I realised I had all this time, I decided to go for it and use that time creatively.”

More large-scale pieces followed: ‘Glimmer of Hope’, inspired by the pandemic, ‘Mexican Graffiti’, made using colour skull-print fabrics bought in Mexico, and ‘Orcadian Wave’, a sculptural piece mounted on wire celebrating her love of Orkney.

Even a broken ankle didn’t hold her back. She used the time she was recuperate to teach herself to embroider by hand, and now used both hand and machine embroidery in her work. “A friend said ‘You paint with threads’, and that’s exactly what I do.”

Three years after setting out on her new artistic career, Alison had enough work for an exhibition. “A friend mentioned the Dundas Street Gallery and I dashed down and arranged it and never looked back. I hope to meet more people during the show, and tell them about my work, but nothing will stop me, I’m sure. Watch this space - I’m sure years down the line there will be another textile exhibition.”

Alison Johnston: Needle Pulling Thread is at the Dundas Street Gallery until 30 March