this work we do  2020

cotton, silk, linen, wool, botanical dyes, cotton thread

110 x 65 cm

 

‘this work we do’ is a hand-stitched textile collage comprising fabric pieces gifted to me by a colleague in Canberra.

I received a grant from Shellharbour City Council to contribute a work to their online PosARTivity Project. The instructions were to create something that could be viewed online and to spend no longer than one week on the work.

At the outset of the Covid 19 restrictions in Australia, artist and colleague, Samorn Sanixay who works with natural dyeing, sent me a parcel containing pieces of her dyed cloth. I had been staring at them for weeks, pondering their textures and colours, and the possible ways to incorporate them into an artwork.

These fragments contain material histories of their making. Foraged and saved botanical matter from her walks, her garden, traces of Samorn's life are embedded in each piece. In some ways, I have made a kind of a portrait of my friend, a narrative in cloth and stitch.

The work is a rectangular format, with the dyed cloth pieces overlaid and tacked onto backing fabric. Using kantha embroidery - a simple running stitch, I spent just under forty hours making a new piece of cloth. The hours are embedded in the work, stitch by stitch and thus represent our combined labour, hers and mine. The work that we do as artists, made visible.

 

Thanks to Samorn Sanixay and Shellharbour City Council.