Chapter Four:

White Rabbits, Turning Gently, Evocative Objects and a very tiny dose of Jarvis Cocker

Two weeks since I took down the sun shattered blind in our bedroom. A week of waking with the light, making tea and returning to bed with a soft toy rabbit. An hour or so of passing needle and twinned threads of Laine St Pierre 104 into the thinned-out flesh of the nylon body I hold at my lap. Plush mending before breakfast.

I make small loops to replace the areas of worn out plush, new work covering old ground. Starting at the face, then ears and paws. I’m reminded of gardening, of reseeding. John - this rabbit - has a twin, Peter. Known collectively as The White Rabbits they belong to Sarah-Joy Ford and I am mending their love worn bodies for her upcoming exhibition Rabbit at Bury Art Museum. They’ve come a long way before this reseeding stage. Beginning with their handover at Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery, a rucksack stashed train journey to Swansea and something approaching a forensic assessment of damage by me. The removal of their compacted stuffing; torso, limbs and head, all retained in individually sealed bags. Four baths in conservation grade detergent and a slow drying out. Half way there. Half way to go. My unthwarted optimism.

Peter and John aka ‘The White Rabbits’ before their first bath

I’m noise sensitive and have long slept with earplugs dampening the outside world, but waking to morning birdsong and working on John has arrived as an unanticipated, and much welcomed, pleasure. My mending ritual is followed by a cold shower, I can’t do the outdoor winter swimming thing, dressing and then to cook my breakfast. This is also new.

So begins Spring. It’s been a long, grey and trouble strewn winter for too many people and I slipped easily into old habits of avoidance and retreat. I do not have a thick skin, and I’m glad of that, even with its problems. The most obvious thing to have suffered is this, my writing. Too many times I started, sketched out thoughts, added paragraphs, revised, erased, started again…Often there was too much, sometimes too little. I was very slow, properly plodding, almost giving in. Then two things arrived. The first, a book. The second, those rabbits.

The book, here’s a thread of sorts, is Sharp Notions, and is where I found Kathleen Winter’s writing. At first, I confused Winter with another writer whose work I have enjoyed, Kathleen Jamie. Both have an attachment to the natural world, to nature writing, but Winter is definitely not Jamie. At a time when I thought I may have lost the thread, I lingered over Winter’s description of her stitch journaling:

‘In my writing practice, I sometimes have no words, and that’s when I turn instead to thread and cloth and colour and image. I can stitch memory and sensation in a way that often eludes words.’ [1]

Similarly ‘lost for words’, I also turned to cloth and thread. A stretch of worn cotton, torn from a much larger bedsheet - something I’ve come to think of as my cloth sketch book - unwittingly became my winter companion. I’ve described this as my ‘working outs’, a nod to my experience of not being good at maths and how I was encouraged to show all my working out, as if this might compensate for never quite getting there. I am still working things out. The actual ideas I’m working through belong to an on-going project about Anna Freud and the Hampstead war nurseries. I’d leaned heavily into words at the start of the project, using metaphors around seaming, folding and joining to explore Anna’s working relationship with her father, and now lost for them, I was at a standstill. This is when I returned to the ‘whatifness’ I explored after reading Charlie Porter’s Bring No Clothes in chapter 3. What if I just start stitching? What if I try not to think too deeply about where this is going? Rip off a strip, thread a needle, start stitching.

Studio image, detail from Anna Freud: Navigating the Seam

Winter’s arrival didn’t start me writing again, not quite that alchemic, but it did help me understand what I was doing, am doing. I felt seen in my ‘making for making’s sake’ and this mattered.

Perhaps it was January, or even December, when I tried hard to read Celia Paul’s Letters to Gwen John. It sits atop my bedside jenga bookstack, within it a line from John’s 1922 diary as reassuringly comforting as it is instructive, ‘Turn gently towards your work.’^[2] I hope it worked as well for John as it did for me. These five words, incidentally, I reach for five whenever I work in multiples, became my loadstar. Holding them in mind I am more able to see my work as something nourishing, rather than testing. A good friend I might choose to sit alongside, and not something against which I might judge my apparent failings. Turning gently is both act and attitude. And I did turn, my head to catch unfinished pieces from unexpected angles, turned to cleaning up the mess in which I’ve been working, which always helps and I’m trying to see that as an act of self-care.

And then another week has passed. Thinking about words but not writing. I’m back here, fussing at my desk, checking for unanswered emails, turning on more lights because the gloomy weather has returned and my mood has tipped sideways…then remembering Gwen John and turning, gently. Tomorrow is my self-imposed deadline.

Let’s try writing for writing’s sake.

Kathleen Winter’s essay led me to her book, ‘Boundless: Adventures in the Northwest Passage’. Boundless is an account, underpinned by personal memoir, of her journey between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, as writer-in-residence on a boat journey that broadly follows the ill-fated 1845 expedition of Captain Sir John Franklin. I’ve mostly read it in bed, at night. It’s returned me to an earlier work of my own, The Knitting Forecast. I’d written a gansey pattern for Mission Gallery, itself once a sailor’s mission, and The Knitting Forecast is an audio piece of me reading the gansey pattern from cast on to cast off in the tone of the nightly shipping forecast. How I loved the shipping forecast as a child, listening to it under the bed covers on my turned down to whisper level blue pocket radio - I shared a room with my much younger sister – enjoying the rhythm of the clockwise journey around the British Isles, the even-paced tone of the broadcaster, the magical names –  Dogger, Viking, Hebrides – the theme tune, ‘Sailing By’^[3]and me drifting into sleep in some fancied kinship with ‘those at sea’. A proper nostalgic return. Beyond this, Winter’s writing is a reminder of my capacity to travel outside of myself without leaving my home, or bed, and this is a good thing.

Material softness is never far from Winter’s writing, which may appeal to fellow cloth kin. She is enchanted with travelling companion Elizabeth’s cherished ‘thirty year old woollen undergarment’, which I guess to be a nightdress, and which Elizabeth keeps rolled on her lap at breakfast. Winter persuades Elizabeth to lend her the garment, so she might ‘spend time with it in the library at night, recording its delicateness with my pencils’.^[4] This giving time to the well-loved and well-worn is familiar to me, it’s at the core of my mending practice. And so is the drawing, but that’s for another time. Elsewhere, Winter crochets with yarn brought along for the journey, making what she describes as headgear. She adds washed and teased out lengths of muskox fleece, gathered by a fellow passenger, to her crochet, but I’m disappointed she stops short of spinning, of fashioning her own spindle…just a potato and a knitting needle, or fork, or whatever.

Fleece is a useful segue into the rabbits, my morning companions, Peter and John. I’m used to mending soft toys, from teddies through to knitted dragons. The first was Robin Hood, a rather upright and stern bear, his left ear separated from his head. Robin was part of my project In Kind, which began during the first summer of the Covid 19 pandemic, I doubt there’ll be another project quite as easily resolved as Robin.^[5]

Robin of Sherwood, my first In Kind repair

I try to balance mending with other projects. There are practical reasons for this. Mending requires close looking, for wear and tear, to identify materials, their points of connection, and disconnection. There’s also lots of conversation, mostly storytelling, which helps me with context; of hopes and expectations and me checking for things in the mending that won’t do…parts that must be kept, those that can be ‘let go’. Most people really embrace sharing the story of their evocative object.^[6] This feels like an unfolding or opening out, it’s necessary and also enjoyable, and not something I’m prepared to rush.

After talking, I turn to looking. This stage comes before the opening up. I’ll spend time holding and turning, teasing apart seams, checking for damage. Often, I’ll chance upon evidence of previous repairs, stitches made by younger, and sometimes less experienced, hands. Lovely big stitches, with a real sense of purpose. Occasionally, the interventions of someone long since gone. In both, my tendency is to retain rather than remove. This is so with Peter and John, where earlier repairs, by Sarah-Joy’s mum, remain.

Bathtime, the first of four

Mending is physically close work. In confident mode, what I think of as ‘flow-state’, I listen to music or audiobooks as I work. When trickiness arrives, a precarious unpicking or a very particular act of close-looking to enable my working outs, everything is stilled as concentration heightens. I work at a standing desk, but still, hours of unpicking, stitching or darning, will leave me stooped over and somewhat boggled eyed. Stepping back rests my eyes and also brings the work into focus, as important at the undoing stage as it is at the remaking. I’ve written about this undoing before, but it grows in significance the more I become involved in the mending or repair of cherished objects. I am often anxious about the undoing, more so than the fixing. I’m cautious about sharing images of this stage, too often things ‘in my care’ look thoroughly abject.

This, I guess, is some of the emotional labour of mending, taking care in multiple ways. Always in my thoughts, the knowledge that I have been trusted with something quite precious. All this holding and containing has a very particular weight and is why I might simultaneously work on something with a much lighter emotional heft, like a sock darn.

Soft objects – teddies, blankets, rabbits – can be especially evocative. This is the case with Sarah-Joy’s Peter and John, proper life-long companions, her relationship with them extending well beyond childhood.  Our collaboration explores some of this attachment, there’s going to be a publication to support the work, so I’m not sharing too much here, yet.

I’ve resisted a deep dive into the idea of the transitional object, enough already and I need something to start the next chapter. But continuing this theme of attachment, I’d like to share a very special project to finish. Way back in February I spoke with Veronica Rowlands, one of my ex-students, and Russell Barratt, textile artist and quilt maker. They’ve been collaborating on a quilt project with Year 4 pupils and parents at Old Ford Primary School in Bow, East London, where Veronica works as a Room 13 artist-in-residence. The project ‘Transitional Memories: Intergenerational Quilting’ was funded by Action for Bow, and invited three classes of nine year olds to think about objects that mattered to them, their special toys. The children drew the toys from their imagination, their drawings translated into fabric collages and pieced together to make an impressive 2 x 3 metre quilt, complete with batting and backing. Veronica anticipated drawings of game consoles and was surprised that almost every child drew a soft toy, using them to narrate personal stories of kinship, love and attachment. It was Russell’s job to combine the individual squares into a lively and joyful patchwork quilt, which will be displayed in the school’s stairwell. I enjoy that this project was funded locally, made locally and will stay local. A proper sense of shared belonging and a good place to end.

I’ll be back again soon, meanwhile, turn gently.

Russell Barratt working on Transitional Memories (shared with permission)

Afterthoughts

A Book: Sharp Notions: Essays from The Stitching Life a Canadian publication, my copy is from Abebooks.

An Exhibition: There’s Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art at the Barbican, though I found it strangely lacking. Sargent and Fashion at Tate is fine but needed more frocks and accessories to be properly spot on. I think Echo at Antwerp’s Momu was perfect, so good I visited twice, and there’s a great catalogue.

A Film: There’s only one film I could possibly share and that’s  Maeve Brennan’s The Embroiderers, 2016 I watched this as I waited to meet Sarah-Joy at the Whitworth exhibition Material Power: Palestinian Embroidery.

Textile Making Workshops

‘And I filled my Room with Flowers’: Drawing and Thread Workshop: 11th May and 15^th June. Two places have become available on this on-line workshop I’m co-teaching with Chloe Briggs. This sold out within days of sharing, so do contact me via Instagram or email if you’d like to join us. The fee is £50 or 59€. One day long workshop, 11.00-17.00 on the 11^th May, followed by a work share from 17.00-18.30 on the 15^th June.

Quilt with Me: I’m taking a break from quilt teaching at least until the autumn, but do message me if you’d like to add your name to the next class.

A Makers Retreat in South West France with Chloe Briggs aka Drawing is Free. This is a week-long drawing and textile retreat ‘Conversations between Drawing and Thread’with both of us at Clos Mirabel, which is gorgeous. I’m travelling by ferry and car and will bring lots of samples, materials and textile books. Please contact Clos Mirabel to book a place, or me or Chloe for more information. Small group with limited places. 22 June - 29 June, 2024

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^[1] Sharp Notions (2023, p.128)

^[2] Celia Paul, Letters to Gwen John (2022, p.52)

^[3] Incidentally, Sailing By (Robert Binge) was chosen by Jarvis Cocker as his final – and takeaway track – on Desert Island Discs. I like Jarvis, do listen to his ‘Desert Island’ if you can.

^[4] ‘Boundless: Adventures in the Northwest Passage’ (2015, p94)

^[5] You can watch me talk about my In Kind project at the Textiles from Home Conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I’m the second paper in Mending Practices

^[6] Most of us have an evocative object, something we cherish that occupies meaning beyond its use value, that connects us to others, acts as a continuing bond. Sherry Turkle’s ‘Evocative Objects: Things We Think With’ deftly demonstrates how ‘an object serves as a marker of relationship and emotional connection.’ (2011, p.5)