I've been making little brooches for myself, a wearable art project intended to test my textile skills at a small scale. Recently I posted a few brooches to Etsy for purchase - they can be found here.
Brooches are a beautiful and expressive way to adorn clothing and accessories, but making them has also helped ease my mind when working on larger textile projects were logistically prohibitive. I'm glad to be able to share them on such a diverse platform.
Whenever I go on a trip to the beach, I bring a textile scrap to soak in the sea terminus. This weekend we went to Merimbula, located on the Far South Coast or Sapphire Coast of New South Wales. There, we frequent Main Beach, where whales can be sighted offshore headed south to Antarctica with their young.
Living in a land-locked city, a trip to the sea is an occasion. We travel through the flatlands, down Brown Mountain to meet the shore - about a 3 hr drive. The water was choppy in the bay, I rolled my jeans to submerge my peice of cloth in the foam, a process photographed by my partner. Soon after, I stitched the scrap down (still salty and damp) onto a new white ground for a project titled Gain. This project is about making space for explorative and diaristic making, a large-scale hanging populated with memory and occupation. Textiles are very much a part of memory making, and this cloth will always remind me of our trips to the bay.
Updated: Dec 8, 2024
An update on my ongoing artist book, Hold Hands Spring Tide. Much has happened since the last update - I've added pages, layers, stitching, personal artefacts held in pockets and naturally dyed panels. I submitted the artist book, secured with a simple machine-sewn binding, for assessment in early June, though looking back, the work seems physically thin. I've expanded considerably since.
Towards the end of June I was hospitalized. Though I took HHST with me on the ward, I was only able work periodically. Instead, I documented what I could in writing, recording my experiences before and during the month I was there. Impressions, routines, personnel, patients, medications, psychiatric phenomena, progressions and regressions. Much of my memory during this time has shifted or retreated, so these notes are both difficult to process and precious.
Home now, I have been catching up, transcribing the notes to the fabric pages of HHST. It takes a lot of physical effort, and each letter, each stroke or eye takes up little space, so the rate of accumulation is slow. But the gradual development of the work - and the commitment to a dedicated space - is fruitful. Viewing the body of work is witnessing a bold cache of what has become a reflex - observe, note, process, translate. It feels more impactful, this way.
