A STITCH in TIME

I use hand and machine stitching in almost all my work. Machine stitches to join pieces and build textures, hand stitches to create line and define edges. I love working with a variety of stitches - zigzag and blanket on the machine, chain, stem, running and french knots by hand. Each stitch is a marker of time.

One of the things I am often asked about heavily stitched pieces is "how long did it take to make." It is a question I can never answer since each piece evolves over weeks or months of intermittent work often beginning with materials that I have already invested hours in transforming. Do I count only the time my hands are touching and changing surfaces? Do I count the false starts, wrong paths and dead ends? They are there embedded in the memory of the piece even if no longer visible. Do I count staring time, dreaming time? Every moment of my history that created the story I now convey?

Textiles tend to deal with steady accumulation, fiber into cloth, pieces into a whole, beads on a strand, stacked layers. You can see the growth stitch by stitch. Different media and techniques have different relationships to time. Watercolor or brush painting can take years of practice to acquire the ability to make the perfect stroke, executed in a moment. Clay has a time of transformation during firing, out of the hands of the artist.

I think as makers and visual artists we each are attracted to ways of working that resonant with our own stories, adding depth while making them visible.