An Awkward Marriage.....

 

 I started using copper wire in my textile pieces around 2004. It was then an adjunct to frame the fabrics, lending strength to cloth I had taken apart thread by thread and rendered virtually thread

-bare.

I moved away from this practice. I found it laborious even then to work with the wire. But, after a gap of many years, around March this year, I decided to pick it up again - using the same copper wire to embroider with. It was awkward to say the least. Earlier, it was intended as a support for the fragile nature of fabric I had created, this time I tried to integrate it into the fabric structure itself.
 

Although it is relatively malleable as far as most wire is concerned, this copper wire is still tough to work with - to get it to do what I want. It goes all over the place, reminding me of how difficult it can be dealing with people who are WIRED differently.
 

When I stopped trying to control the gleaming russet wire, its wilful meanderings brought elements into play that thread could never do and started me thinking.....

I have persisted with many ghastly results but slowly we are finding a way to make things work. Or so I think...  ..!

Compared to needle and thread which is delicate and so amenable, the copper wire makes these grand but clumsy sweeps. I don't use a needle. It works as needle and thread in one, but its point is not as sharp as a needle, so it isn't easy to penetrate the layers of fabric that I like to work with.

I won’t blame anyone for thinking its sacrilege to add this rather crass, awkwardly meandering thread alongside the delicate Kantha and chain stitch. I am in two minds about it myself.

 

 It takes a lot of work to marry their disparate elements but there's also something about the wire, which sort of eggs me on to keep working with it, despite the awkwardness.

I let the wire thread its gauche way through the fabric and then I spend hours covering its naked audacity with floss, using a half hitch knot[i], which is similar to a buttonhole stitch, except that the latter catches a loop of the thread on the surface of the fabric, while the half-hitch knot is traditionally used without a needle to secure some object with rope to a hitching post. Anyway the process of covering this wire with three strands of untwisted embroidery floss takes forever and the thread gets so twisted that I cannot continue. So I have to turn the piece upside down, let it hang a bit, to let the twisted thread unwind, then get it back up again and start the process all over again.

I liken this, to what I feel myself, when life is challenging and it seems that I have to stand upside down, to be able sort it all out.

 

When I stand upside-down the whole world is perfect.

It’s when I have my feet on the ground

that everything looks upside down.

 

I have to admit that working with the wire has been getting to me of late - not quite enjoying it as much as when I started out.
 

The gawky gestures of the copper wire are alien to the delicacy of stitch, yet also evocative of some part of me that is restless, impatient and insecure, wanting to live larger than life, even if it’s just occasionally so, before I am brought down to earth with a thud.

And it happened one Sunday evening six weeks ago, on 30^th June to be precise, when I collapsed after a swim, shivering with a sudden rise in temperature to 103 degrees. I panicked, more at the fact that in the middle of a summer evening’s temperature of 38 degrees Celsius, I lay under a light Jaipuri quilt, without a fan on, my teeth chattering, while everyone around me, in the same room, had sweat pouring down their cheeks. To add to my consternation, even my yoga teacher had left a message, earlier in the day, to say that I should take it easy with the regimen.

Things had been hectic and I was exhausted, but I thought: it can't me more than that. Anyway, I went through the blood tests nonetheless thinking, that at worst, I must have picked up some viral bug. Eventually I was diagnosed with typhoid which is why the pages of this e-journal haven’t been written in for a while.

 

But, all the health shenanigans aside, the pressing question is:  should I persist with this marriage of wire and thread, or is thread alone enough?

 

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[i] The half-hitch is an ancient knot which is a simple overhand knot where the working end of a line is brought over and under the standing part.  It cannot stand on its own and is usually tied around a pole or some structure, even rope. It has however been incorporated into beading and other embroidery methods.

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.