EMBROIDERED WORK
The View
It started on the fringes of rock-bottom, I needed to occupy my mind, so I sat down with my pens and sketchbook and began to draw. Out of the page came a vista of colour, despite everything else feeling grey.
As a lifelong fan of science fiction I always contemplated what would be left behind after civilisations downfall. Stone survives long after bones and glass and metal and nature usually reclaims the landscape. I wanted to capture this dystopian idea of the end of humanity where nothing but the stone pillars and the sunrise are left. The bigger question within this idea was would hope and faith survive. Does the innate human instinct to find a way, to get up each morning and face another day, would that be impossible for modern humans if we had to return to a semi primitive lifestyle.
I reasoned that if all else was lost, the sun would never fail to appear. Symbolic of restorative hope, that the sun will always rise on a new day. Life giving, burning, powerful and constant.
The drawing had felt preordained in the way it came out of the page, in the same way sculptors describe the figures coming out of the marble as they chip away. I wanted to make the image permanent, to transmute it from paper to something physical. As I am not a stonemason (though apparently my great grandfather was) I chose embroidery as the means to capture it. A medium that may not last centuries like stone, but may outlast me.
I scanned the drawing and started playing with the resolution in photoshop to pixelate it. Cross stitch is essentially stitched pixels and with a 12 colour palette I was able to create a diagram to use for the embroidery.
I set up my frame and began stitching in the summer of 2018 while heavily pregnant, navigating a break up and in the process of moving my entire life and business into my mum’s spare room. I didn’t know it at the time but it was the start of a 5 year journey through the greatest hurdles I have ever navigated and a global pandemic thrown in the mix.
I worked at it when I found moments of peace and the methodical repetitive stitching acted as a sanctuary to escape into, absorbed in the task. The motivation came and went as motherhood took priority but gradually the pixels gathered. As with most traditional craft it consumes hours and weeks without protest from the maker. Fixated on the goal of creating something of signifance.
Five years after its inception, as I completed the last row of stitches, I had to recognise the progress I had made since starting the piece. I had rebuilt my life and found real happiness with my son, our home, a new job and the friends and family that supported me throughout.
It now hangs on my wall as a reminder that I survived my own apocalypse.
