Gaze No More in the Bitter Glass

   Last year I had to leave my home and studio of twenty five years and it was not easy. It was my little paradise and the grief process was long. Whenever I closed my eyes I was back there, walking around and looking in the corners. It was a tiny place, a studio cottage of one big open room with a bathroom.

 

 To find a way to preserve the memory and still move on I decided to embroider the maps of my heart, both the placement of the furniture and the way that I moved around it, after 25 years the routes were engraved in my soul.

Handkys are symbols of grief and loss and as I unpacked and put things into storage I found a pile of my great aunts handkerchiefs. Fine lawn cotton and linen, they were too beautiful to pack away and forget so I embroidered them instead.

 

A fine linen one was used for the floor plan and four delicately embroidered lawn ones for the movement maps. The idea was that these could be overlaid onto the floor plan and the ghost of my home would reveal itself.

Coming in from the Shops

Getting Dressed and Making Breakfast

Going To Bed

Watching a Film and Making Tea

Floorplan on linen

 

Stem stitch, Bayeux stitch, Chain stitch and Bullion stitch 

Angel Of Love

 

   So, in 2017 I began a small wasps nest in raised needlelace. It was a bit of a challenge with the circular chambers and the angled formation of the nest. How I made the base was crucial to the overall stability of the piece but there was no way of doing a practice piece I just had to do it.

When a piece of work really tests you it can be like a banana skin in your mind, it just keeps slipping away when you think of it! So the following year I did some more but by this time I was fully involved in my medical residency and the making of the surgical models. I was filmed making the piece but actual progress was slow. It was still unformed in my mind and therefore hard for me to come back to with much certainty of whether it would actually work out properly. There is no small amount of anxiety when you invest so much time in a piece.

   

Then, after much upheaval in my life I came back to the piece in 2024. I picked up where I had left off with the top nest section and quickly realised that it was all okay! I had been so close to resolving in my head and hadn't realised it. The branch followed and then early this year I made the smaller section and there it was.

What drew me to doing this was a photograph of a solitary wasps nest and a long term fascination with the paper that wasps make themselves. To reproduce the making process of another being was key to the whole work.

I found that I had to think like a wasp, think how I would construct pod shapes from the inside and how they would link together. Each construction section be it the base, the pods, the lids or how I moved (stitched) from one area to another was only solved by doing it and being it.

It is the second piece in a series called Angels of Heaven based on a text in the gospel of the Essenes; the quote I worked from here is  ''Loving words are as honeycomb''. The first piece is featured on this blog and is called "Angel of Eternal Life" under the search term 'angels'.