Hello again, real world. I’ve been away for a while.
Not-so-good things have been going on, and because of these, let me tell you
about my latest stitch project.
Unlike the majority of what I would consider my ‘work’,
here is something entirely to do with the stitch process itself with any
aesthetic value being secondary. In other words, it’s the act of stitch itself,
the tactile qualities of holding and working with the fabric....the end result,
whatever that may be, is almost irrelevant to the process of producing.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, clawing myself back
from a minor nervous breakdown and a month signed off work, I present to
you..... more patchwork as therapy. I fell in love, and my partner went to
prison: a bullying campaign against me also reared its ugly head, and I found
both my creativity and ability to function in general severely compromised.
This project was not so much inspired by awful events as insisted by them: I
needed something to calm me down besides Valium, and previous patchwork
experiences led me blindly back to the one thing I could start ‘re-engaging
with myself’ through. ‘Safety is six
sided.’
The following is an excerpt from a letter I wrote: If you
will, persevere with my rambling, my perspective on this should hopefully
prevail......
My passion for
embroidery extends beyond the purely professional, recognising its highly
therapeutic and emotionally beneficial nature.
A number of years ago, alongside my professional practice and my
subsequent degree, I was diagnosed with clinical depression and as such fell
prey to a circumstance of seven shades of hell. It was during this dark period
that I was unable to get out of bed, to function normally: trapped in my own
‘mental prison’ of clinical depression and an eating disorder, I could see no
light at the end of the tunnel. Gradually, unconsciously constructed
self-condemnations of worthlessness gave way to utter personal conviction that
there was no hope and as such I became suicidal.
It was at this
point that I discovered patchwork. It became my therapy, a reason not to
despise consciousness, and a method with which to start reclaiming my sense of
self-worth. Mundane as it sounds, rhythmically preparing paper hexagons with
fabric and combining them into the beginnings of a quilt became my highlight of
the darkness I was lost adrift in. I would find myself able to engage mentally
with an activity that then progressed into long periods of time, hours on end,
happily immersed in something other than my own apathy. Patchwork completed for
me what Prozac couldn’t, and as my quilt grew, so did I: eventually, I was able
to go back to ‘the real world’ and my quilt was displayed at the 2011 NEC
Festival of Quilts.
But what really
inspired me to start this project is events of recent months. My partner was in
court six weeks ago and sentenced to prison.
This event alone, along with a subsequent bullying campaign from those around me
and other events prompting a severe emotional fallout, had put me in a bad
place yet again. Unable to eat, losing weight, sick with worry, running on no sleep and awake
at every hour of the night was showing warning signs of another depressive
episode. So somehow, without even thinking about it, I found myself in my
studio at 3am beginning another quilt. Just the repetitive, rhythmic action of
sewing – of engaging with the fabric, of the tactile qualities, of having
something to hold when I was wide awake in an empty bed – helped. Using the English traditional method of
piecing over papers, the back of every piece has a thought or an emotion –
mostly about my boyfriend – written into them, thus I am quite literally
‘stitching my thoughts together’.
The pieces are a sensible size, 6cms from tip to tip, and
it’s extraordinary not to care about the colour arrangement or any such sense
of ‘outcome’. Hopefully it’s the first step into re-engaging with my craft, and
hopefully something a little less ‘robotic’ and more spontaneously creative
should emerge next.....
Urgh. Spilt my guts yet again....
