While stitching these ‘photo hankies’ I started to question why. Why remake a digital image into a laboriously stitched piece where the process of drawing and stitching removes and alters some or most of the image’s content? The question started out of the hard-to-shake-off received (imposed?) reputation of hand-stitching as domestic and inconsequential (and even more so when labelled ’embroidery’, or ‘fancy work’). But I can just as readily frame the act of painting as archaic and ridiculous – why smear and daub oil and ground up rocks across a piece of cloth? Slow. Pointless. Unproductive. My answer (which may satisfy only a few, and they would then be the audience…) is in connection, and in touch:
“Whoever wants life must go softly towards life, softly as one would go towards a deer and a fawn that was nestling under a tree. One gesture of violence, one violent assertion of self-will, and life is gone. You must seek again. And softly, gently, with infinitely sensitive hands and feet, and a heart that is full and free from self-will, you must approach life again, and come at last into touch. Snatch even at a flower, and you have lost it for ever out of your life. Come with greed and the will-to-self towards another human being, and you clutch a thorny demon that will leave poisonous stings.
But with quietness, with an abandon of self-assertion and a fulness of the deep, true self one can approach another human being, and know the delicate best of life, the touch. The touch of the feet on the earth, the touch of the fingers on a tree, on a creature, the touch of hands and breasts, the touch of the whole body to body, and the interpenetration of passionate love: it is life itself, and in the touch, we are all alive.”
DH Lawrence
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Very very thought provoking, Ruth. Love it 🙂
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