The Violence of A Needle

The other day, my friend Manisha, posted this comment as her status on facebook:

[20th June 2013]

 

“Nigella chocked, Rihanna battered, Madonna hit on the head with baseball bat, Halle Berry hit so hard that she looses hearing, Whitney Houston with cut-lip & bruised cheek, Mariah Carey too !!! [Delhi Times 19/6]

........dear men of the World.what is it that propels you to such aggression...is it just patriarchy????...from glitzy Hollywood to our own shores.........for a while I shall avoid asking ''what right do you have to do so?"

 

[I have reprinted it exactly as she wrote it, spelling mistakes included]

 

It was late in the evening when I read it and soon after, I picked up my  embroidery. I kept thinking about what she had said. I could not dismiss it. I too have been in relationships that have been abusive and violated my sense of self in physical and emotional ways and I could understand where she was coming from. It allowed me to feel my rage too. Does it happen to all women? Is it about self-respect or lack of it? And what does one do when one has been through such experiences? The newspapers report some crime or other each day. Rape, murder, terror and even the recent flooding in Uttarakhand is no less violent, is it?

 

With these thoughts circling my mind, I kept sewing. Needle in, pull the thread, needle out, going round and around, tracing the stains with a running stitch. And then I realized that using the needle could also be considered an act of violence. The fabric is mute, it does not protest and just like I made the stains, it seemed that I was subjecting the fabric through the act of stitching, of piercing it again and again with the point of this sharp instrument, to another kind of violence. I looked at this long, slender tool, held between my thumb and forefinger, its pointed tip poised to strike again, waiting to lunge forth into the fabric, at my command.

 

I stared at it long and hard. It was after all a perpetrator of violence – a criminal like all the men who raped and abused and those who killed, and mother nature herself was not beyond it too. As they say when someone is cruel – what kind of person are you, what are you made of? I have no idea what the needle is made of. I asked it the same question: what are you made of? I looked on the packaging for some clues, but there was no mention of materials used.

 

Needles have been around for a long time and sewing in the subcontinent dates back to the Indus Valley civilization - needles have been excavated at Mohenjodaro. I quickly did some research and learned that the first needles were apparently made of bone or wood while the modern ones are made using high carbon steel wire which is nickel or 18 carat gold plated to minimize corrosion resistance. The highest quality embroidery needles are apparently plated with two-thirds platinum and one-third titanium alloy. They are tough and pierce through fabric without bending or losing shape - without any kind of compassion it seems.

 

I had never thought of sewing as a violent activity but as I continued with my embroidery, I learned something.

 

The layers of fabric in my hands had been subjected to considerable violence. I had burned it. I had shred it and had then stitched these layers with needle and thread, piercing through the warp and weft, tearing the very fabric asunder. But the miracle of stitch is that the needle may wound, the needle may pierce and tear, but the thread it carries, keeps it all together – embellishing the fabric it wounds.

 

If one considers how beautiful embroidery can be and how much this art is used to embellish our clothes and homes, then the needle doesn’t just wound or violate, it provides for another dimension to be added to the fabric. If one could extend this to the human fabric, could one begin to look at acts of violation as opportunities that add something of value to the fabric of being?

 

Something to think about.....?

 

 

 

Running Alongside Kantha.....

Yesterday was incredibly muggy. I felt very sluggish. I am usually disciplined about my exercise in the evenings, but the pool was shut and my legs just refused to walk.

 

 Tuesday is also teaching day for me. Much as I enjoy it, I also feel drained. Getting to understand someone and how to draw out their creativity can be taxing and I look forward to my own thread ramblings at the end of the day. But I was fidgety yesterday. I did not feel like doing anything. I had this craving for chocolate so decided to get a Snickers bar and worry about the calories another day. Well, I did sort of consider it a possible bribe to persuade myself to walk around afterwards, but it did not happen.

 

Finally, around 8.30pm, when I saw that I was not inclined to do anything else, I did get down to doing some embroidery and before I knew it, the time was 1.00 am.  All I had done in over four hours was rows and rows of Kantha - one stitch running after the other. It’s on days like this that the magic of embroidery reveals itself anew. 

 

Stitching never seems like work and I can keep doing it for hours together. I wonder if any of you feel the same way too. Often, I feel guilty if I spend the whole day doing this instead of writing and attending to other mundane stuff like accounts and household chores. I usually do my needlework at night when all the rest has been taken care of and I can just sew. 

I find Kantha with its almost mechanical steps - of needle in, picking up the cloth at three to four points together, keeping the thread length, as equal as possible and then, a gentle tug that creates a healing whisper as the thread passes through the ruptured fabric, is very calming. You need to concentrate, but after a while its almost automatic, like breathing, you almost don’t realise you are doing it until the thread finishes or somehow a knot appears.

 

I went round and round the fabric with neat rows of running stitch. By now I have added some more fabric stained with tea leaves onto the white muslin, alongside the burned-and-cooked-one-inch-bit I started out with. On Saturday, I took out some nylon net, silk organza and cotton organdie and using Red label tea, dyed these fabrics. To my surprise, the cotton fabric barely stained, but the organza dyed a delicious umber and the nylon net took on an interesting ochre shade that veered towards a hint of burnt sienna. I did not iron out the creases in the organza as I thought this would add texture to the muslin. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do as this piece has been a bit of a challenge. The process has been more intuitive than planned.

Working with photographed images, as I did earlier, was much easier because the marks were already there and there was a kind of narrative that I could develop through them. Here, I started out with a blank canvas. There was so much to say, but needle and thread demands patience. I have to tell my story slowly, at the pace of the needle. And today, what intrigued me was doing Kantha over creased organza and yellowed net and the unusual texture the running stitch took on. It’s hard to describe in words so do look at the photos. I found the thread almost luminous when it stitched over the net.

 

Yes, I know. I have cut and torn the fabric quite brutally after the delicious layers of thread running neatly around. It happens, I need to vent my frustration and in a sense it is also the frustration of stitch – its painstaking process is pitted against the speed of a digital age.  Running against the tide of time would frustrate anyone and to keep going at snail’s pace because that is the best you can do is not just a challenge, it’s the only way to keep alive a tradition – its skill and art. 

Imagine, if no-one stitched with the hand anymore, if there were no needles left on the planet. Imagine then, a planet of people that did not know how to sew with their hands. Imagine our Earth without all the beautiful embroideries that mankind has made and seen.

 

I can’t.

 

Needles have to sew.... to ensure stitch lives on.

 

 

 

15 June 2013, Saturday

Yesterday, I picked up my embroidery after a few weeks of just not being able to engage with it.

 

A fresh slate it was.

I had started afresh with the idea of taking the stains one step at a time. In other words a little at a time because the earlier piece, the one I had started in March had become too daunting to work upon – there just seemed to be so much of those dark and foreboding marks, that I felt intimidated.

So last evening, I took a small fragment of the fabric I had stained with tea – one piece just sort of disintegrated and came apart in my hands and gave me the idea – inspired me to re-think this way.

I envisaged taking this one inch by one inch piece of dark brown fabric and placing it on white muslin and just doing the barest minimum of stitch around it. I had wanted to let the mark speak for itself. It had seemed such a simple idea, at the time, but the enormous contrast in scale and colour and of juxtaposing something so weathered and beaten against a pristine surface was even more daunting.

 

I started off just tacking the loose ends onto the fabric. I wanted to keep that sense of disintegration and then these threads led the running stitch all over the fabric, but the process is slow and the large expanse of white to be covered, with a kantha stitch that cannot give me as dark a surface as the staining had done, was troubling but it was a pleasure to be doing kantha again.

 

 

I love the little ridges that appear and sometimes I even deliberately pucker the fabric, pulling at the thread to create a little bit of tension. I have also layered the fabric. There are two layers of loosely woven cotton [markeen] below the white muslin, which creates a soft quilted sort of look.

I ambled along, going around in concentric circles for a while. They seemed to evoke my confusion and it was also a means to find some order through the process.  I worked for a couple of hours and  then called it a night.

Introduction

When I first embarked upon this journey, examining the marks in my tea-cup and ruminating through thread, I worked with digitally printed images on fabric. In this way, I used the photographed images to trace the marks with thread. After about three years of doing it this way, I thought that I would create the marks on fabric using tea-leaves to make actual stains, rather than working with stains in the tea-cup that I had photographed. 

 

I made and drank tea and saved the tea leaves and tea bags and would dump them ad hoc onto white muslin fabric and pour hot water over them, leaving them for a couple of hours to stain. If that was not enough I would put the fabric with the tea leaves and some water inside a hot oven to bake them as it were, often ‘cooking’ them until the fabric started to char.

 

I was careless. I really did not care how I made the marks. Actually, I had never done this before, so I tried this and that and bumbled along. I loved the marks that emerged. I felt a certain empathy with them. They were evocative of what I had endured through life, what I often felt like: Burned, torn, stained and so fragile that all I seemed capable of doing was trying to make sense of what my life was and why it had turned out this way.

 

The fabric is stained but not. colourful.The fabric is burned but not yet turned to ashes, there is still some life in her. At first I was quite excited working on the fabric as it was, but then realized that it really was too much to handle all that darkness in one go. No matter what I did to the fabric it seemed to depress me, as if one could never transcend it.

 

But I persisted; I added beads and metallic thread and then worked with copper wire, using it as thread - covering it partially with a hundreds of half hitch stitches. Actually I made it up as I went along. I used a needle and thread, doing my own version which was more like a button-hole stitch. My intention was to add colour to an otherwise drab landscape.

 

Maggie, a textile friend from Australia was visiting and when she took a look, felt there was too much going on. However, at that point [end of March 2013] I was enjoying playing with the various materials, so I thought why not go over the top and for a while it was fun, but then I found  myself staring at the work for days without wanting to pick it up and realized that it really had become too much to handle.

 

There was very little charm left in speaking to her, engaging with her. She seemed so spent through the grueling process I have subjected her to, that she gave me nothing back when I tried to engage with her. The marks had no story they wanted me to tell. Or maybe there is just so much that it’s too intense for me to comprehend? It’s as if she can’t care to explain the marks: marks which I created with my carelessness. All she does is to lie pliant in my hands, in total surrender.

I gave up working on the piece, but she was constantly in my mind – at the back of everything else that I did. Often, I would just look at her and wonder how I would ever find a way to tackle the marks again.

 

About a month or so passed by and another couple of artist friends dropped by my studio. It was through my discussions with Kathryn, a painter, from the US and Manisha, a potter, who works in Delhi, that all those thoughts found some re-direction - a way forward and that is where this journal starts.