My initial inspiration came from a garment called a barrier, given to me by my mother. It had been worn by both of us, and darned and mended by both her and her mother (my nanna). The significance of this was echoed in the words I found written in my mother’s notebook that became both the catalyst and epitome of this project:
‘By starting each line in the thread above that in which the previous row finished, finishing in the thread below that in which it was begun’
Being perishable themselves the textiles and images provide only fragmentary evidence of each woman’s life. The lines of stitches, the binding, seams, patching and mending symbolic of textiles skills handed down through generations, manifested in this body of work, each chapter has to be ‘read’ in order to make sense of and understand the whole.
‘As cloth makes manifest deeply held cultural values that may otherwise be imperceptible – in fact it may be a woman’s very crucial job to translate these ephemeral values into material objects’. Generations and geographies in the visual arts.
