strands & threads

‘“the touch of a vanished hand,” ‘Mrs. Beeton’s Needlework Book,’ preface

The works on paper comprising the strand series are made from layers of acrylic, pastel, watercolor, graphite and charcoal. Some works have a 3D element, knitted or knotted from rubber tubing or handspun wool, pinned to the piece with stainless dressmaker’s pins. During earlier centuries, garments were willed to the next generation – textiles were very valuable. As styles changed, the clothing was altered to fit the current trend, often resulting in pieces left behind, or stored for later use.

“She unfastened her ragged old shawl and bound the kerchief about her head. It was a relic of the monopoly, the middle part still whole, a black silken cloth handed down from grandmother to grandmother, smoothed through the centuries by the caress of stringy old hands, like a fragment of a fragment of the worlds’ riches, or at least a proof of their actual existence. ” Halldor Laxness, Independent People, p, 298.

Looking at photographs of fragments of Viking clothing, the discovered garments, buried in the mud of Greenland for over a thousand years, one senses the hand of the maker.