A Stitch In Time

On discovering a passion that I long to pursue

It is no secret that I have a searching soul. I am often greedy. I am hungry for experience and hungry for answers. I look for them everywhere, turning things over, picking up pieces and putting them down again, trying to figure things out; trying to find the answer to the questions that stick and rub against me.

One of the questions I have wrestled with for over a decade is the matter of how I can best produce the art I want to make. I have never been content with ‘just’ being a writer, or a poet, or ‘just’ one of anything. Art is something I want, but wanting and doing are too different things when you are unwell and have few resources. The people who share and teach art online can make you believe anyone could do what they do if you followed their advice, but whatever I have tried, and I have tried many, many things, in a hundred different ways, I have kept coming up sharp against some unbudgeable wall or another.

Often, my body got in the way. It’s laughable how long it took me to acknowledge that yes, that would be the case, wouldn’t it? None of the artists I follow or try to learn from are disabled, or certainly not in the same way that I am. Of course not being able to sit up for long, let alone spend much time out of bed or go outside much, would change things. Other times the obstacle was money, space, my eyesight, the honest demands of a daily routine when you are trying to raise a teenager on your own in a cramped house and write books and make ends meet and study and heal and and and. No, their way could not be my way. I have never seen it mentioned that squeezing out paint feels like squeezing money straight out the tube, never seen someone mention the tight feeling it leaves in your chest, but it does feel like that, often, and I hate it. I have wrestled with that, wrestled with mess in places I couldn’t afford mess, wrestled with unsatisfying adaptations, with cheery “I’ll try this instead” proclamations, wrestled with shame as I tried to make myself smaller and smaller, carving off what I really wanted to try and make it work. Yes, there were solutions, but they weren’t what I wanted.

But, in amongst all the searching and frustration, it hasn’t all been switched-off lights. Sometimes, in the muddle, I would find an answer; a bright lamp in my brain switching ON, illuminating my confusion. I have discovered that I love making marks, that I love bold colour and texture and composition, that I love collage, cutting and arranging, and that abstraction lights me up while realism leaves me yawning. These were all good things to find out, like pieces of a puzzle.

Late last year, another light switched on. I had been sewing a lot, something I have done since I was a young, sick child needing something sedentary to do. The walls of my family’s houses are adorned with my intricate embroidery, windows into long solitary days. After 30+ years, I have got very good at it, and I was thinking about that and about needle, fabric and thread, and this is what I realised:

that fabric is free, or can be, because it’s always being thrown or given away

that stitching can be picked up for five minutes and put down again

that something you can do on your lap is bold, beautiful and subversive, that it can fit around mess and motherhood, that it can be done quietly, slowly, and that, dismissed as lowly ‘women’s work’ it can infiltrate spaces usually denied us;

that applique and patchwork can be used like collage and can be just as bold and exciting; that fabric can be dyed or painted on like a canvas, but already comes in colours as rich as any painter’s palette

that fabric already makes up my environment, comfortable and giving as it is; that it makes up the bed I must stay in and the loose, layered clothes I must wear; that I live a draped fabric life in a heaped fabric world and that making things that also bend gently to its contours feels good

that it doesn’t require a studio, or even any space at all

that wear and age only makes all this more interesting

that it’s slow and secret like me

that there is something counter-cultural and exciting about doing something that few people have the patience to do, made from scraps and unwanted things, particularly if it’s done in bed

that fabric and stitch don’t need to equal twee; that there are edges to push at here

that I can still stitch when I’m in pain or exhausted; it uses up less of me

that these thoughts, drawn together, are art, or could be

So many answers to problems are about lateral thinking. When I figured it out, I felt the ground give way in panic. Isn’t that funny: the relief and the despair as I curled around it - what I wanted to make and how I could actually make it - because all I could think was, “ but it’s too late now, surely! There won’t be enough time to get good at this now. Too many people are already ahead of me!” I began to see incredible abstract textile art everywhere, with a kind of aching possessiveness. “Please let me have this,” I wanted to beg, to everyone else already strong on the path. “Please let me in. Please don’t elbow me out of this one too.”

It took time and breathing to remember that there is enough to go around here. Of course it’s not too late, and nobody else comes to this with my heart and my mind. There is room, and I could claim it.

And so that’s what I’ve begun to do, slowly, as befits something slow. Now there is a box of old fabric by my bed, full of donated scraps and spares and I am working out what to do with it. I turned 41 years old on Saturday. My son bought me a beautiful book about the relationship between drawn marks and hand-stitching, how one can inspire the other, and it joins a growing library of resources that I’m learning from. Maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll get to live double my days. What could I do with them if I started now and did not stop? This is a wide, deep pool to dive into and for once in my life, I have everything I need.

I want to end with words by Rilke:

“You are not too old*
and it is not too late.”

I want to ask: what if this were true for you, too?

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*or too poor or too sick or too tired

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