Stitch, pierce, repair

I have been using stitch for lines and for texture and have been thinking about how the stabbing of the needle into the cloth brings something extra – it expresses a kind of violence, perhaps a kind of necessary pain which simultaneously pierces and repairs. Stitching, as in mending, strengthens. But it also perforates and weakens. A piece which has no functional purpose except to be displayed on a wall can be very fragile, unlike a garment or serviceable cloth which must withstand handling and use. As I stitch, I damage, I restore.

Stitched handkerchief from Instagram image. Work in progress for ‘Liminal’ exhibition, March 2016.

Stitch as touch

Work-in-progress, Liminal, 2015

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

 

Work-in-progress, Liminal, 2015.

Residency – art in the making not in the made

I had intended, months ago, to write about the process of making the Beverley map, to summarise my residency experience and then show the work in Perth as a conclusion to the experience.

I stalled.

After a long hibernation I have become aware of how my intense experience as artist-in-residence was just the start of what will be an evolving project. I took to Beverley questions about what and how to observe in a new environment, and how to use art-making to explore those questions. In my previous post I describe  collecting information by walking, photographing, collecting and drawing. That research focus changed when my hosts invited me to show my work on the last weekend. I switched from gathering information, ideas and samples for future works, to producing work (or work-in-progress) to hang in the gallery. I also wanted to be part of the established tradition of donating a work I’d made there for the gallery’s collection. With one week of the stay remaining I took the samples I’d dyed from local plants,

and, perhaps influenced by the gliders circling overhead, decided to take an aerial perspective and piece a fabric map of the town site.

Sensations that arose while making the pieced map extended beyond cutting and stitching the fabric to my experience of the physicality of moving across the land. I felt the rounded curves of the rolling hills as I shaped the pieces to curve into each other.

Faint odour of plant-dyed fabric recalled walks under gum trees, bark crunching underfoot.

I joined the pieces with vertical black stitches so that the seams stood up like fence lines. The last stitches went in on the final morning. In the gallery I noticed that the Beverley locals who looked at my work saw their familiar town with fresh eyes.

Back in Perth, I felt unable to call the Beverley map ‘finished’. There was more to it than representing a town map in dyed fabric. In Ground Truthing Paul Carter writes about what a map reveals and conceals, how language, memory and being on-the-ground both enrich and contradict the impression from the air. Being on the ground to collect sensations and materials gave me a means of responding to the particularities of Beverley (physical, historic, cultural) through the process of making. Studying the plan of Beverley and remaking it into a pieced map made clear how the layout of streets and railway had been decided in response to the river Avon. And as the Avon flows into the Swan so the thread of the river leads to Perth where the streets, boundaries and buildings of the city are oriented and shaped by its position on the Swan. Making the Beverley map was not a culmination but a plan for thinking about the city of Perth, and beyond, for a mud map of how to approach any place I choose to observe and remake.

Ways to make work: Planning or intuiting

It is half a year since I finished studying. As warned by more established friends I am wandering about in hazy, boggy directionless realms, tripping over confusions of ideas and bumping into deadlines. Timelines, proposals, action plans seem forced, their language too stark and linear. So I am accepting my swampy state and slowing down to explore and dream quietly with materials, and time.

I have two works hanging side by side in the studio. They both express what seems to be a recurring theme for me, of combining disparate elements so that the qualities of each are present but together they form a whole that is more than the sum of the parts.  But they were made in quite different ways.

By planning:

Equilateral

For Equilateral I started by choosing a favourite form; a Möbius strip. The width of the kimono fabric and the size of the triangular space in the centre dictated the overall dimensions and so determined the width and length of the piece of hand spun, knitted grey mohair which is the other surface of the quilt. Two different fabrics, quilted together into a form which unites and reveals both surfaces.

Through intuition and chance:

Two journey to

Sometimes a piece evolves unintentionally. From an indigo pot on the go, a piece of silk and a plastic cylinder I made a (very) rough version of pole-wrapped shibori. It went into a pile of fabrics on the table until its mid blue undulations lay next to a warm brown length of layered and stitched fabrics which I’d put together with no end in mind than to  be something to stitch on in the good company of other makers. And now, after a gentle three years, I am putting the final stitches into Two journey to.

Something as simple as observing how I make reassures me that I can continue.

Salt of the earth

The Bullock Hills Road crosses a salt lake, dry and very white at this time of year.

The thick crust of salt reflects light off its crystal surface.  There is dark softness underneath.

Layers of white cotton cloths, geometrically stitched and cut create a regular textured surface.  Silk would be more reflective.

Plough path

Partly systematic and partly random, this cloth was part of an assessment last year.  Too hard to find my own words, I liked this from Rebecca Solnit in As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art (University of Georgia Press, 2001, p 58)

the artist as collaborator or midwife for a world that already has meaning and order, rather than an autocratic creator imposing meaning upon an inert, waiting world or making a better one out of nothing.

Rebecca Solnit

Catching up with R

Looking for a distraction, and needing to stitch, I delved into the bag of materials and samples from John Parkes’ July workshop (see this link and scroll to the bottom).  I had left the top R pinned, without stitching, as the fine brass pins looked beautiful with the transparent fabrics.  But now I’m going to stitch, both around the reverse appliqué and into the whole cloth.

The hanky was a gift, the red fabric is thick wool cloth salvaged from my old dressing gown and there is also part of a favourite linen shirt and a fraying silk scarf.  The colour and thickness of the red wool argues with the other materials, which feels appropriate right now.