Patchwork Object

Items

• Patch by Anna
  This piece is typical of the way that I currently work with stitch and collage. The paper background is taken from collaged images in a series of sketchbooks that I have been working with for about thirty-five years. I do very little ‘sketching’ in my sketchbooks, but use them as a way of storing found images I want to keep. Sometimes they are saved just for the colour, sometimes the images are chopped up and reassembled into grids or abstract montages. This forms the foundation for the stitches, and dictates the colours used in any individual piece. Colour is everything to me, not just in my creative work, but in how I experience day-to-day life. The stitching is the part I love most of all. I’ve found that blanket stitch works as a flexible building block, a simple, practical stitch that creates line and structure. The colours of the background interact with the stitches, inviting the eye to wander around the piece. Stitching feels like a fundamentally feminine creative process, historically practical, but also beautiful. Portable and easily worked on during ‘in between’ gaps in daily activities. The colours used here are those of a domestic space: my kitchen. I have come to realise that this making and stitching is something that connects me not only with my mother, and her mother – women for whom sewing and colour were such a source of pleasure. But it connects me to a community of makers, known and unknown, stretching back through time and across the world. So much skill, history, and beauty is contained in the act of working with a needle, and this is me, in the present, stitching.