Making Good
To make good is to repair, make fairer, or complete. This small sculpture transforms notebooks – artifacts from my former role as a social policy researcher – into a tableau of figures coming together to listen, support and respond to each other: a yarning circle perhaps. The materials and the process itself guide the story. While tearing, scrunching, binding and stitching the pages of writing that represented many years of work and knowledge, I reflected on how reconciliation begins with unlearning mistaken ideas. The layers of stitched netting both honour and eclipse that past work. The words become illegible marks of effort, subsumed into new forms that aim to speak to the heart not the head.
This sculpture continues my practices of using textile techniques to communicate care and humanity, exploring the meanings to be found in everyday materials, and peeling back and questioning my own experiences and historically situated context.
Dimensions: h.16.5cm x w.37cm x d.25cm
Materials: Re-purposed personal notebooks, linen, cotton and silk thread, muslin dyed with tea
Ties that bind is my second completed work in this series reflecting on my former social justice work from my newer perspective as an artist. In this work the archived notebooks are repurposed into a family group, placed on an irregular ‘plinth’ and surrounded by a nebulous net. The ambiguous constellation and uncertain grounding of these figures prompts unsettling questions, where once my written words might have proposed answers.
Dimensions: h.36cm x w.26cm x d.20cm
Materials: Re-purposed personal notebooks, linen, cotton and silk thread, muslin dyed with tea
Suture is my most recent addition to this body of work.
Materials: Re-purposed personal notebooks, linen, cotton and silk thread, broken family china, industrial spool
Dimensions: 35 x 30 x 30 cm
The world is full of broken things. Right now, I don’t know if I believe in progress any more, but I have always believed in repair. Joining our raw edges together against the odds, giving new form to what has been discarded, balancing fragility and strength, finding constancy in transformation.
