A subversive stitch complete

I have sent these little books out into the world and they appear to have reached their far-flung homes so it seems safe now to talk about the process and the finished product in a bit more detail.

The story behind BookArtObject this time around is that Sarah Bodman wrote 100 short stories based on Kurt Johannessen's book Exercises, where one of the tasks was to write 100 stories and bury them in a forest", which she duly did. If you want to know more, you can follow this link...  Each story had a title, (the full list is here) and we were able to nominate which one we would interpret.  I chose first of all "A subversive stitch", and secondly "snow falling in daylight". With no idea what the real short story of that title is like, I headed off with an open mind.

My mind wandered across several different thoughts and approaches for this book and I settled on a combination of ideas around women's work and stitching, darning, and embroidering; about censorship and letters written home during the wars where sentence were blacked out, leaving the safe words showing; about stitching to remove words and leaving others; about history where men mostly got to write it and women weren't featured. Quite an amalgam.

I machine-stitched the words away on the cover, leaving the important ones behind, with threads dangling madly everywhere. On the inside pages, the words are sealed in place and can’t be easily removed or erased; and yet the tracing paper makes it a bit hard to discern what is written. The words are printed on paper where I had also printed an image of the threads off all the covers.

All of the words I used are my own.  I am finding it much more satisfying these days to either work with my own words, or those of people I know, rather than than simply working with someone famous' words.  I still love working with others' words, but my own words are beginning to add another dimension to my work I think.

Here is the book from front to back.

Given so much of my work is quiet, subdued and uses a simple palette - this was a very liberating and exuberant book to make. I loved the mess of the threads, I loved the boldness of the colour, and I loved the messages.  A lot of my work is about quietness, peace and gentleness; yet this piece has a bit of the feminist in me in it which I thoroughly enjoyed expressing!