Personal Threads: I have Sewn all My Life.... - Guest Post by Heidi McEvoy Swift

 

I have sewn all my life. I made dolls clothes when I was five, was given a children’s sewing machine at six, and was using my Mum’s proper machine at seven.  I love making clothes.  From dolls clothes I moved on to making my own clothes, and adapting and altering bought items to make my own creations. Through my college years it was mainly ballgowns that I made, spending far too much money on gorgeous fabrics and spending hours adding beadwork and embroidery.

I began working part time in theatre ten years ago.  Initially working as a wardrobe supervisor I gradually built up my role so that I now design and make costume for all the in-house shows at Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds.

During the lockdown months this year I began a couple of new sewing projects.  Initially I was working on a project I set myself - to work with some half started embroidered tablecloths and tray-cloths I was given by a friend. These cloths were all printed with ready to go embroidery designs, and had mostly been begun, but were not finished. ‘Finishing the unfinished’ involved me re-working these tray and tablecloths from her my friends’ mother-in- law’s ‘legacy’.

Instagram became my saving grace during this lockdown.  It’s a platform that I have no love of, and had rarely dipped into its possibilities, despite having set up an account about 5 years ago.  Working in total isolation is so very hard. Some kind of audience is necessary, so I started to post images of work I was making on Instagram.  At this point, I was embroidering images to do with lockdown on cloth, to be a kind of diary, but frankly I was struggling, it seemed too banal, and possibly too kneejerk.

Groundwork Gallery's #doorstepenvironment challenge appeared on my Instagram feed at the very end of April, and initially appealed as a displacement activity for that first day! The work the gallery specialises in is environmental, so somewhat removed from my textiles work, however the themes interested me and I decided to engage with the challenge anyway, but adding in my own proviso that I had to include stitch.   This led me to start of a whole new project looking at things on my own doorstep and garden, in a new light.  

I embroidered images, borders, words and phrases relating to the daily prompts and photographed them. Sometimes I made textile frames for landscapes, embroidered words onto my own clothing, or worked directly onto plants.

 The ‘stony path’ prompt, alluded to in the last post above, was a reference to Herman de Vries. And his exhibition in 2017, which was named after Ian Hamilton Finlay’s garden in the Scottish borders.

I love wordplay, and often incorporate words in my work, and this became another of the connecting factors between the pieces I made.  The beauty of Instagram, and indeed photography, is that the photograph is the final image, which is something I had never quite appreciated before and this became hugely liberating!  The pieces I was making in stitch no longer had to be ‘finished’, the image presented is enough.  I ended up working right through the 30 day challenge list of words and phrases, each a prompt that inspired a whole range of thoughts and inspiration, some more than others.  This in turn has led to some very productive lines of exploration, which I am still processing and making work from.  I have thoughts of where I can go from here, and maybe I will, or maybe it will all turn into something very different. Isn’t that just how it goes?

I am sharing some of my favourite pieces here, some from the challenge, and some made since and more recently.

The challenge gave purpose to some work I was already trying to formulate, and cemented some thoughts about presentation and accessibility. I had been trying to work exclusively with stitch and textiles, so decided to include that in each post as my personal challenge.  I did not intend to do all 30 days, but gradually realised that it was a good way to keep focused on work at a time when everything was very difficult in so many ways.’

 

This was the first time I sewed directly onto the plant.  The theme was ‘Wild food’ and apart from dandelions and nettles there was nothing remotely edible in my garden.  I knew I was going to use the word ‘eat’ and the strawberry plant was the most obvious choice. It also reminded me of William Morris. 

The theme was ‘Today’s revelation’ which proved challenging to me. How do we receive a revelation?  I used the words ‘look’ and ‘listen’ as instructions.  I captioned the piece ‘Take a little time, you have plenty’.

 Looking skywards is such an uplifting thing to do when the sky is so very blue and cloudless.  The Cordyline is so sharp and pointy it really leads your eye up.  Mind you, if you looked down on it  would poke your eye out! The golden yellow thread both alluded to the sun and complemented the variations in the leaves.

I have always loved the phrase ‘there’s no use crying over spilt milk’.  The phrase today was ‘Spillage’  and putting ‘don’t cry’ on the cloth to clean up the milk seemed a perfect message as we were stuck in this lockdown situation, with people complaining about how the situation was being handled.  It was very satisfying sewing onto the dish cloth, and it still sits on my sink, reminding me.  Later that day I spilt wine and couldn’t resist making the companion piece! (go and find it!)

“Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams”

('The Cloths of Heaven' by W.B Yeats) 

The theme was ‘Hard surface’ which the slate certainly provides.  The harshness of the sun emphasises that,  and the softness of the rose petals presented such a perfect contrast.  The petals were much more delicate to stitch on to and tore so easily I had to sew very carefully.    The phrase ‘tread softly’ comes from the Yeats poem and is often on my mind.  The petals were strewn like dreams at my feet.

This is the last image in a series of three photographs which show the deterioration of the rose.  I sewed the word ‘alone’ on the fresh leaf in response to the theme word ‘isolation’, but did not use it.  I often feel bad about cutting flowers, artificially shortening their life.  This was a beautiful rose, then it is sad to see its decay.  By the time we get to this, the last image, the word ‘alone’ implies that loneliness causes decline.  Perhaps it does....

This image was made as lockdown was relaxed and I went for a walk in the abbey gardens.  It was so good seeing a different environment, but also felt a little scary as there is no knowing now how the world will change.  I left the leaves in the pond for others to come across.

Following on from the doorstep environment challenge I have found myself working more onto plants both in my garden, and out and about.  Often it is the damage on leaves or plants caused by insects and birds that calls me to make an intervention, other times words, or fragments of song or speech lead me to a make a piece.

I have called the collection ‘Passing thoughts’ as that is what they are.  If I were to attempt to define what each image is trying to capture that would be it.  Passing thoughts.  A lifetime of listening, and reading, of words in your ear, your head, in your life, on the radio, in song, in passing.  The words that accompany you, stick with you, earworm you. These are the things that come out of the blue to make an image.

The piece ‘Not moth’ looks at the holes in the Bergenia.  Something is eating it up.  Working with clothes as I do it is not unusual to be upset by holes appearing in woollen or silk garments, but I know exactly what makes those.  I thought of darning the Bergenia leaves, but instead, outlined the holes in blanket stitch, drawing attention to them while I considered the damage.  I next patched some holes, with offcuts of other leaves, using panto-like stitching as a nod to what I might normally be making if at work.   

Once you start looking at damage on plants it is everywhere.  Some of it actually very beautiful, bringing new colours and texture to the leaves, sometimes the culprits are right there, aphids, caterpillars, wasps laying eggs, taunting.  Or rather, just getting on with their lives really!  

Having acquired a set of old handkerchiefs I had in mind all the words we use associated with handing a handkerchief to someone, phrases of consolation, and compassion, and the uses for a handkerchief.  ‘It’s going to be alright’ is central to the handkerchief featuring the most damaged leaves.  While sewing the words ‘plagued’, ‘diseased’, ‘wounded’, ‘maimed’ and ‘blighted’ to label the leaves, I was thinking about the whole situation with Covid19.  

I left the handkerchief under a shrub in the soil.  For five weeks it stayed there weathering whatever came at it there on the soil.  At the end of its lockdown, there was very little of the leaves left, some were completely gone, some staining and dirt marking the cotton.  Having now laundered the handkerchief, it bears the stitches, the words, and the marks permanently.  I think the world will bear the marks of this pandemic too, no matter how hard we try to make it better.

Some of the other work I have been making is leading me back to my love of costume and clothing and maybe as the autumn creeps upon us this will be the most natural direction to pursue.  First steps are the embellishments I applied to the white linen jacket I made in May for another project.  While the leaves in the images relate to what was happening in July, I have further plans for this garment.  I hope I get around to sewing them

 

Heidi McEvoy Swift, graduated in Textiles, from Central St. Martins in 1985. She has since, worked as a motif and garment graphics designer, been a lecturer in textiles in FE, run workshops in various arts and crafts as well as taught sewing. On hindsight, Heidi says “ during my textile design course I made up handprinted or knitted fabrics into garments and should probably have actually studied fashion.” Originally from Liverpool, Heidi, her husband and two sons, now  live in Suffolk, UK. Despite residing there for more than half her life, she confesses to not being “in love with the flat dry prairie like landscapes. Even though the “lack of rain is a distinct advantage to someone who would most happily be in sunshine all year round.”  

Website: www.mcevoyswift.com

Instagram handle: @mcmcswift (aka Heidi McEvoy Swift)

Photograph Album

I had started this project of working with stains by photographing the marks in my tea-cup and then getting them digitally printed onto fabric. Suddenly, about a month ago, it struck me that I wanted to work with photos and not have them printed on fabric. I wanted to use photographs from an album and embroider them. I went to the photo album of stains on my computer, edited some images – posterized them and played around on with the little photoshop stuff I had picked up over the years.

 

 There was a sense of urgency to the whole process. I was excited and wanted to see what would emerge, as much as the need to work through  a very stressful phase where I wasn’t getting the usual time to exercise, meditate and write in my journal – dealing with all that came up with the kind of careful scrutiny and analysis I have used to deal with the emotional build-up. I was quite stressed and didn’t have the patience to work with the hand so I used the sewing machine. Actually it was next to impossible to really get much done with hand sewing. Photo paper is thick and the stitches were large and gangly and didn’t really do much to alleviate or express the frazzled state.

 

I hadn’t really used the machine much since my last lesson; the experience of which I shared in a recent post. I didn’t have a clue as to how the machine would respond to photographic paper but some exploration and experimentation revealed that the machine is really quite amenable. If I had any problem it was with the paper, which tore easily. But that was resolved by using fabric beneath and above the paper. Yes, this did sort of create a veil and softened the stains, which made me want to add another element. And that was when I decided to burn the photos.

Armed with candles, some I burned with the fabric already stitched. And some were set alight before I put them under the scrutiny of the needle. As the photos of the stains, that I had recorded some time in 2009, burned, I realised that I was in some sense burning the stains – those marks that symbolized embarrassment, guilt and shame. I felt my frazzled nerves calm down almost as if I was off-loading emotional baggage - catharsis was taking place and without the usual ritual of conversations.

 

 

Burning photos, I found, was different to burning ordinary paper.  I didn’t want to really burn them to ashes so I kept a close watch over the photos as they burned and noticed a few things. They burned slowly. And instead of shrivelling up with a bundle of soft and feathery ash beneath them, like regular paper did, the ink smoulders, the paper melts and cracks. The ash is not soft and papery and in some sense purified by the fire, like paper being reduced to ashes – it has a kind of ugly quality.  It is not even ash, the photos crackle into a kind of putrid, thick and almost sticky, black substance. Photographs being burned created the oddest sensation which I encapsulated in a poem.

Flame
Yellow Orange
Ice-blue
within the burning red  

sets ablaze
photos

Ink smoulders
Paper melts
smokes
crackles into putrid ash

After the ritual of burning I sewed into the layers of photo-paper and fabric. It was a very intense process. Controlling the machine - to go round and round the marks, as I do by hand, is easier said than done. Especially with a novice like me trying to do it, but I had such fun. I wasn’t interested in making a piece of work that spoke of fine craftsmanship but wanted to explore the idea of erasing marks in the mind – memories that mark us. Going round and around the marks allows for tracing those marks – like going over the conversations or experience and putting them into perspective.

As I worked with the machine and then the hand - sewing in those odd details that only the hand can do, I realized that the stains or marks of experience that one may try and ‘burn’, are never really erased from memory. They can be buried in time, warped through its seconds and minutes, months and years, but what the mind may feel is forgotten becomes embedded in the body. The body doesn’t forget.
 

Those cells which supposedly renew themselves, they seem to retain the nature of our experiences in a way that our minds seem to have forgotten. I mean, think about it: if we have truly erased, forgiven and forgotten, then what accounts for the countless diseases that abound? 

As a healer I am all too familiar with the idea of stuff being buried under the carpet which shows up as dis-ease and therefore I think it is more about pushing things out of our minds, which often  may seem as if we have forgotten.  It’s worth pondering on why some people are healthier than others – especially those who are more cantankerous, miserable and vocal about their woes.

Memories
sewn as thought 
fade

These marks
buried in time

warped through weft   

the body
doesn't forget

And Wish That I Did Not Feel

 “This well is far too deep, deep and black, a watery void.

These dark grey ageing stones are holding onto the surface with bitter ambition, old and darkening, adorned with olive-green mosses. This well was built by my hands, each stone laid down under a waxing moon. I am fated to drown
                                                              beneath its brown shameful waters, waters that flow so deep they touch the very Past, Present, and Future.

I will sink ever further through stagnant tides with my lungs overflowing and my eyes blind, sinking past the places beyond the light of the living world.

I will touch the solid core of the Earth with cold lifeless hands and wish that I did not feel.”

Still Waters [a poem]
Reproduced with the kind permission of Jade Kennedy
www.jadekennedywriter.blogspot.co.uk

The last line of this poem grips me, and knots me up in a bundle of complex emotions which is what the whole idea of ‘feeling’ does to me – of being alive to sensations of pain, of not understanding something and feeling overwhelmed by things – by life as it unfolds.

Why do we feel? Why can't I just be there for someone regardless of my needs and feelings – of unresolved pain, from things in the past, between us? Why must there always be this kashish – this pull, this tension between people and in almost every aspect of living? Why do feelings always seem to get in the way? 

The other day I picked up a piece of six-ply floss that I had earlier removed a two-ply strand, but carelessly left the rest without straightening it out, [as I usually do] thinking that I would be using it soon. But, typically, something had come up and my embroidery and tools hurriedly bundled away. When I came to use it a day or so later, the bunched up strands, of what had been perfectly straight threads, had become knotted.

Just like those unresolved thoughts that one didn’t quite get around to dealing with, because something else came up.

It took time to open the entangled threads and the funny part is that it wasn’t really a knot, but appeared to be one because the threads had become twisted. I pulled a little here, and tugged at the thread a little in the opposite direction. I inserted a needle and made space in the knot so that I could pull the threads out. It took quite a bit of patience and I could feel this irritation welling up inside me. It was my own fault. I had left things carelessly and had no choice but to deal with it, just as the poem says:

“This well was built by my hands, each stone laid down under a waxing moon. I am fated to drown
                                                              beneath its brown shameful waters, waters that flow so deep they touch the very Past, Present, and Future.”

 

 In its own time – of tackling those uncomfortable twists and turns, the floss was unravelled as if the knot had never been there.  I am always amazed at how this happens. Experience has taught me that I don’t need to cut the thread and throw away almost half the strand but that I can unravel it. And when the knot opens it is such a lovely surprise, always.

It’s almost as if the knot was never quite the struggle it seemed and its funny, but I often get the same sense when there is contention in my mind and I sit and ruminate or fume in isolation but, when I meet the person or people who have been catalysts for creating this, I get this really strange feeling that none of that was ever an issue. And yet, I know it had been sitting there like a leaden weight – a knot, somewhere in my being.

However, it did take time and a lot of patience to unravel the threads, much like those complex issues that keep running through the mind, which if left too long, seem to get into a twist.

In this instance, I took the time needed to open out the entangled thread but, when I need space to deal with the stuff that experience throws my way, I lament at why it needs so much time and I can hear my own voice judging me, as selfish!..... and more such epithets.

Yes, I know it's a conditioned reflex that leans on those voices that taught me to how walk and write and more - that it's a voice of judgement that denies or rejects a need in me in order fulfil that of another, but it's a tough call - this tension within, the conflict between what's right by me and to do right by others that often torments me and I throw up my hands in despair saying why, why do I have to feel!

I wish I didn’t feel so much, when every incident didn’t affect me in so many ways – get me into a twist. It isn’t just a sense of pain that one may feel when life tests you, but also feelings of being alive in the world, alive and awakened to the external stimulus of the world, of people and places  - the pain and pangs of being and also the beauty of nature around me, all of that makes me feel. And sometimes, when there isn’t time to savour a pleasant experience that too can be a problematic feeling.

These things need to be put into perspective. What is the world revealing to me? What is the message from the universe? What did the fallen leaf say? Why did those words, that incident topple my emotional balance? Does the spate of raging summer storms reflect the storms brewing within me? Is there any other way in which I could have handled a particular conversation and changed the outcome of things? 

These are countless questions that I keep asking myself each day, as I pause by the window, as I stand up to stretch my limbs after hours of working, shoulders hunched, on my embroidered pieces or typing on the computer. Or as I brush my hair and go about doing other such mundane functions of living.

At one level life is beautiful because one can feel. I cannot imagine looking at the radiant sunsets, especially in the monsoon season and wishing I didn’t feel. The sense of joy that surges through me when I see those transient colourscapes in the sky, is something that I wouldn’t give up at any cost. But the irony is that life is a paradox and feelings don’t always convey such exultation in being.  Those feelings that drag us down – taking us, reluctantly, deeper into ourselves - into that unseen core our beings, where it seems as if we are alone, at the mercy of “cold life-less hands” that do not have the capacity to hug and hold and provide comfort in being, but dispassionately compel us face ourselves, are the ones that most of us would rather avoid feeling.

 That sense of pain, of rejection, of not quite getting what we wanted in the way that we did - when we feel challenged by the world around us, is what takes us into those dark unknown crevices of our being where we would otherwise not have tread, where the poet says:  “I will sink ever further through stagnant tides with my lungs overflowing and my eyes blind, sinking past the places beyond the light of the living world.”

And paradoxically, it is in those dark, hitherto unknown crevices that lay the secrets to release us from these very moments of darkness that we resist. Secrets that life will reveal, only if we allow ourselves to feel - even as the poet proclaims:  “I will touch the solid core of the Earth with cold lifeless hands and wish that I did not feel.”

When I read this poem by Jade Kennedy, an English poet who lives in Kingston on Hull, [whom I met on a Google+ community] I felt a stab in my gut – of recognition of something I’d felt too, but hadn’t been able to put into words, at least not quite so poetically,

 I empathized with the poet and echoed her sentiments. This poem gave me solace in knowing that someone else felt the same way, which counts for a lot in my book. It  made me realise that the poet in allowing herself to feel the full intensity of being in that given situation which echoed something I too was familiar with, had been able to articulate what many others like me may well feel, but are unable to express  - put into words and find this kind of clarity. But reading the poem lent that clarity and with it a sense of relief too.

It is in sharing that we lend a bit of ourselves to others so that they may find something of themselves in that. And it is only in finding these fragments that we do in effect, experience some sense of wholeness. In a world where the essential spirit of our being is separated by form and identities that question each other, what other way can there be to experience this?

It made me think - If as a creative person, I could enable people around me to find a piece of themselves, this alters my perspective on being an artist and writer. It allows me to feel less selfish and self-indulgent, for needing the time and space to put my life into perspective – deal with my feelings.

 Even as I continue my lament alongside the poet when she says:

“I will touch the solid core of the Earth with cold lifeless hands and wish that I did not feel.”