For my group critique I present To hold (Trace/Time). The fabric is a thin and striped bed sheet that I bundle-dyed this summer during a residency in Talla, Tuscany. We were camping near the woods and I would go every morning in the forest first thing, meditating, walking, gathering. The textile contains little stains from lichens and more visible traces from onions skins, leftovers of our meals. I hung the fabric with two strips I knitted recently, dyed last year with a mixture of marigolds from the Piet Zwart garden, onion skins, some Feyenoord’s dandelion and recently overdyed with reseda. I hung the work with the thread I spun, and two spindles as weights kept it floating in the air.
The other work I present is a patchwork of textiles and reclaimed clays, Looking into the pond. The rejected and forgotten pieces. The thinner, yellowish pieces come from an old bed sheet while the greyish, thicker ones are made with ordinary cotton from a textile shop. I hand- stitched the pieces together. During a workshop with children I gave in July, I provided some indication of plants for dyeing, and sent the kids on a treasure hunt. They were also free to pick something they were curious about, given some guidelines of safety and respect for the plants, so I don’t know exactly about the properties of each plant that we dyed with. Here I have the leftovers, the pieces that were rejected or forgotten among the chaos of saying goodbye.
Seeing beauty in a fragment of learning. Seeing beauty in a spot, a stain, a repeated faded green shade. Will it fade? Will it last? Does it matter? The act of taking care, sewing by hand, giving visibility. Keeping.
I layed down the patchwork on clay tiles. Some of them were still unbaked during the group critique because of the time it took me to recycle piles of dried clay leftovers. A piece of clay is a piece of soil, of ground, of land, part of a living ecosystem. I was wondering where that clay was sourced from. Which soil, which living ecosystem was it part of? How was it taken?
It’s ok to be slow, my tutor Liesbeth told me. Embrace the fact that getting to a result can mean getting lost in the process of going back.