i participated in another project at trapholt museum. they are amazing at doing these projects where they involve ordinary people like me. they always involve some kind of craft - embroidery, weaving, patchwork, knitting. they often ask a young designer/artist to put the whole thing together. and the projects are always awesome to be part of. this time, the theme is time. the mission was to find a single word that means time to you. then, you should embroider that word on a piece of old bed linens. the bed linens were allowed to have holes in them, which you repaired using sashiko stitching and you had to embroider the word in blue embroidery thread. you also had to track your time and embroider how much you spent in white thread. i found a lovely old dyne cover in a nearby secondhand shop, but it didn't have any stains or holes to repair. my piece is 57cm long, because i'm 57 years old. all of them had to be 50cm wide. oh, and you had to embroider a line down the middle in a simple running stitch.
it took me a long time to figure out my word. i mean, really, what one word expresses time if you can't use the word time? i kept coming back to stories. it struck me that we can't even talk about time without telling a story. it never settled in for me a the word that i KNEW i had to have, but i also couldn't get it out of my head, so i ended up choosing it.
another of the rules was that you could use whatever embroidery stitches you wanted, but you couldn't stitch anything figurative. you really had to just stitch your word. and it had to be at least 6cm tall. i had trouble making my word behave as i wanted - i wanted it in my handwriting and in the end, i formed the word from a thin wire and stitched over it to achieve what i was looking for.
and because the wire would have been against the rules, i picked it all out again after i had stitched over it. the whole stitching process took me 16 hours and 22 minutes. the thinking about it took much longer than that. i don't think what i made is high art by itself. i'm so curious how the final work, put together by artist kristine mandsbjerg will turn out. i'll keep you posted. the exhibition goes up in november.
what word would you have chosen?
2 comments:
First, there is nothing ordinary about you! I have been thinking about time a lot lately. With that in mind, at this moment my word would be melancholy. Not in a bad way, but a memory way. You are fortunate to have these creative outlets.
@sandra - melancholy would have taken a long time to embroider! but that would have been a good word. i'm still not sure that "stories" was the right word. i kept thinking i'd think of the right word and have a strong feeling that it was right, but that never happened. i just kept coming back to "stories," so that's where it ended for me.
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