Used clothing and leather, felted knitting, zips, stitch
‘Textiles command an intimate relationship with the body. Our earliest known examples of dress used the skin of animals to cover the skin of people. Critic Anne Hamlyn refers to the textiles we wear as a ‘surrogate skin, a body at one remove’ (Hamlyn, 2000, p42).
All the babies I might have had 2, 2015, detail
at The Embroiderers' Guild Graduate Showcase, Knitting and Stitching Show, London, Oct
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As part of my Embroiderers’ Guild Scholarship I have been exploring further the sculptural capabilities of leather and stitch to provoke an abject response. Leather is obviously the closest material to human skin that I can legally use; it is skin! Skin is the boundary between self and other. For All the babies I might have had 2 I have used a tan nubuck leather hide, which is suede-like and has an interesting rigidity. I have stitched quilted and partly stuffed baby grows, with beanie sections, into the zipped openings.
I have used baby grows in my work in the past and I know that they are highly emotive. Using them to create a piece of work to exhibit at The Knitting and Stitching Shows in London and Harrogate as part of The Embroiderers' Guild Graduate Showcase, where the audience is predominantly women of a certain age was a very conscious decision. I want my work to provoke a response and I know that, possibly for women in particular, there are many stories of sorrow around childbirth. This work is based on my own story, but I know it will have a universal resonance. I installed it alongside Nobody 1, which also addresses my experience of motherhood and a different kind of absence.
Here are images of the sculpture installed at the London show:
I found my response to working with baby grows intriguing. I couldn’t even consider using the few of my son’s baby clothes that I have kept, so these are anonymous, bought from a charity shop. Does this matter? I feel that it actually adds meaning as these represent an accumulation of all the anonymous babies that have not been born.
Is it too literal? Possibly. But I thoroughly enjoyed the freedom of doing what I felt like doing without the constraints of how my University tutors would respond and without having to justify it. I find a dark humour in cutting up baby grows too. They are obviously not babies, but their presence strongly suggests babies. It reminds me of what Bernadac says of Louise Bourgeois’ use of clothing:
‘A garment is …like a stuffed animal, it is a transitional object that represents a person, suggests a mood or evokes an emotional experience’. (Bernadac, 2004, p 155)
And I have stitched and stuffed them so that they are very baby-like, including beanie sections to give weight and form to the limbs….
All the babies I might have had 2, 2015, detail,
installed at Privy, The Edwardian Cloakroom, Bristol, 26-29 June 2016
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In 2016, All the babies I might have had 2 was selected for 'The Memory of Space - Space of memory' exhibition at Centrespace Gallery, Bristol from. November 24th-30th. It was curated by Jan-Phillip Fruehsorge, director of Fruehsorge Contemporary Drawing Gallery and The Drawing Hub, Berlin. Here are some images, including a review of my work in Epigram, the University of Bristol student magazine:
Investigating the notion of stitch as tattoo, I have used a range of flesh coloured threads to draw onto the leather using free machine embroidery. The drawings were abstractions from the original photo cut-outs I used for Nobody I, memories of what is left behind when someone leaves. This time, however, I stitched drawings onto every surface, ‘tattooing’ my memories into the leather, and partly concealing them with loose threads, creating a troubling, hairy surface which blurs the boundaries of visual and tactile experience (Bristow 2011: 45).
‘…hair and skin are sometimes treated as culturally and biologically synonymous, while at the same time, paradoxically, hair is treated as other, different, abject, outside the body’ (Tondeur, 2012)
Attraction or repulsion? A couple of viewers can't resist touching All the babies I might have had 2 at Memory of Space, November 2016
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Leaving hanging threads is becoming a recognisable and important part of my work; I consider the loose threads to be a deliberate form of mark making. Their seemingly random placing is an illusion. In this piece, the colour is selected to blend with the colour of the leather so that the stitching becomes almost invisible. The ends are carefully kept from being stitched into, cut to a particular length, and placed at chosen points in the stitching. Sometimes I have added extra loose ends by stopping, cutting, then continuing stitching. Some threads are curled from being wound on the reel which adds an extra dimension of fluidity to the work.
All the babies I might have had 2, detail, installed at 'The Memory of Space', Centrespace Gallery, Bristol, November 2016
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I have fabricated a surface which amplifies ways for the eyes to ‘feel’ the hairiness. There is a merging of the senses of touch and sight associated with cloth; ‘The eye…does not simply look. It also feels. Its response is both visual and tactile…’ the senses are ‘…each enfolded in the other’ (Barnett 1999: 185). This means that cloth can also be regarded as an extension of the body, a second skin. I suggest that the materiality and skin-like nature of cloth provides an alternative range of meanings, operating ‘both through the haptic and the scopic simultaneously, the two modes of perception provide differing points of access to the viewer’ (Dormor 2008: 240).
All the babies I might have had 2, detail, installed at 'The Memory of Space' at Centrespace Gallery, Bristol, November 2016
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I am very conscious of the multiple piercings of the leather as I stitch…and the multiple piercings of my fingers as I work with such a difficult material! As each stitch pierces the leather it echoes the pain of absence, but is also cathartis, as through the pain comes creativity.
Please see All the babies I might have had 1 which I made in 2011. It's a knitted sculpture, which also explores my experience of childlessness and loss. It's very different in material, colour, process and form, but making it helped me to express my anguish too.
All the babies I might have had 1, 2011, installed at Pattern, Fringe Arts Bath, June 2016
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