Medium: Weaving and Embroidery
Textile works from Masters study to present day.

Mia’s textile practice explores colour, structural design, and the making of contemporary textile art through weaving and embroidery. Existing between art and design, her works are recognised for their bold colour palettes, bright compositions, and obscure visual language.

Looking inward at her split upbringing, Mia reflects on being born and raised in Hong Kong while spending summers in Scotland with her grandparents. Their stories, personalities, and histories continue to shape her creative practice. Her grandfather - a fashionable Scot with historical roots in Hong Kong - introduced her to vivid colour, tartan, and what he would describe as “groovy” design. Her grandmother, proudly connected to Scottish fishing and sea culture, inspired Mia’s fascination with boats, coastal life, and storytelling through textiles.

Her tartan-inspired works stem from her grandfather’s Munro family ties and his love of bold, expressive colour. Through jacquard weaving, embroidery, illustration, and photography, Mia creates richly textured textile scenes inspired by fishing boats, harbours, and maritime memories. These works revisit childhood experiences spent between the Scottish coast and the sea-filled landscape of Hong Kong.

Drawing from personal memory while honouring family histories, Mia’s grandparents remain both her greatest supporters and her strongest critics -a dynamic that continues to push the evolution of her textile practice.

## Local Hong Kong

This body of work explores Mia’s personal relationship with Hong Kong through woven tapestry imagery, combining photography, illustration, graphic design, and jacquard weaving. Created during her MA studies, the series reflects on memory, place, and the quieter realities of Hong Kong life beyond its stereotypical image of luxury skyscrapers and fast-paced city living.

While studying, Mia gained access to a jacquard loom and became fascinated by its ability to weave both a front and reverse side simultaneously.
This duality reminded her of her grandfather’s photography and inspired her to use the loom in an unconventional way - creating woven tapestry images rather than traditional textile designs.

One of the first works from this exploration was *Hong-Kongers on the Move*, featuring imagery of a tram and busy pedestrian crossing. Wanting to create a visual juxtaposition, Mia combined urban scenes with luxurious cashmere and mohair yarns - materials rarely associated with the energy and movement of a crowded city. The softness of these fibres reflects her affectionate and nostalgic memories of home.

The black-and-white triptych continues this exploration through three scenes: the back streets of Hong Kong, a woman fishing, and two chefs on their lunch break. Woven entirely in cashmere, the series was inspired by her grandfather’s black-and-white photography and an amusing childhood memory. As a young child, Mia once asked her grandfather, “What was the world like when it was black and white?” He had grown up in Hong Kong and collected historical photographs of the city, which became an important visual reference within her practice.

Although inspired by archival aesthetics, the images themselves are contemporary and created using different visual processes. The fishing woman combines photography and Photoshop manipulation; the chefs on their lunch break are developed through graphic line work; and the gritty backstreet scene merges illustration with digital editing. Through these varying techniques, Mia captures a softer, more intimate version of Hong Kong - rooted in memory, family history, and everyday life rather than promotional imagery of a polished global city.

A further work within this series, 'Building Cages', explores the layered relationship between old and new Hong Kong through graphic woven imagery and colour. The piece focuses on two iconic yet contrasting elements of the city: traditional bamboo scaffolding and the handcrafted wooden birdcages found within Hong Kong’s famous bird markets.

The work reflects on the long-standing culture surrounding pet birds in Hong Kong. For many years, apartment living and social attitudes meant that dogs and cats were often discouraged, while birds became popular companions within the home. The bird markets therefore became important social and cultural spaces, filled with intricate bamboo cages, sound, movement, and community.

Alongside this imagery, Mia explores the bamboo scaffolding workers who continue to shape the skyline of Hong Kong using traditional construction methods. As a child, she would look up at the towering bamboo structures and imagine them as giant nests suspended around the city. The scaffolders became, in her eyes, the “nest builders” of Hong Kong - constantly rebuilding and reshaping the urban environment.

Through layered graphic compositions and shifting colour palettes, 'Building Cages' captures the ever-changing nature of Hong Kong itself. The changing colours represent the overlapping histories, cultures, and architectural transformations of the city, where tradition and modernity exist side by side.

In 2026, Mia began weaving her largest handloom pieces to date: a series of baby blankets inspired by abstract tartan design. Woven in bright creams with soft blends of blue, pink, orange, and red, the blankets explore colour, comfort, and heritage through contemporary textile making.
The pieces are created on Mia’s one-metre-wide wooden pedal loom using 100% lambswool. The colour palette has been intentionally designed to feel open and universal, allowing the blankets to exist beyond traditional gendered colour associations. Through layered woven structures and subtle tartan influences, the works connect back to Mia’s ongoing exploration of Scottish identity and family history.

After weaving, the blankets are gently felted to soften and blend the surface further, creating an even warmer and more tactile finish. The use of lambswool reflects both luxury and craftsmanship, while also carrying personal significance within Mia’s practice.

The yarn itself was gifted to Mia during her Masters studies through her scholarship at the Royal College of Art in collaboration with a Scottish mill. The same high-quality wool is traditionally used in the production of Savile Row suiting, connecting the blankets to a wider history of British textile excellence and craftsmanship.