Thanks for being here; I appreciate your interest! It’s a new month and that’s a nudge to writing a new blog post.
At the moment I am stitching the last chapter of Stored. It’s a reflection of my family life in the Netherlands. The stack of cloths is soon complete, which I am very excited about.
There are 3 identical serviettes amongst the salvaged cloths, perfect for portraits of my brother, sister and me, a triptych. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I rarely draw, let alone draw a portrait and the ultimate challenge is to stitch a drawing of a portrait. It’s so stressful! In this case slow stitching is NOT good for relaxation.
This is me as a 3 year old. It is still a work in process and I must say that I find it hard to know when it’s done; the hair is a nightmare!
About the age of these Stored cloths, they must be around 80 years old; they were originally from my grandparents, who never owned a washing machine. Every fortnight the ‘Linen Room’ picked up the family’s clothes and textile homewares. It all returned in neat stacks, washed, starched and ironed. To keep track of the customer’s belongings each item had a stamp, which was either the first two letters of the surname (in our case zij), or the house number of the street (44).
The thought of stains in textiles usually brings up a gross feeling, but I had grown up with them; in a way I knew these stains! Binning them felt like throwing away history. For me these cloths are part of our family heritage.
This is my mother’s tin with embroidery threads. It’s such a gem! I can link these threads to every cross stitched item she has made. It is a messy tin, despite the use of cards and old envelopes as an attempt to organise the lot. They have colour codes in both my mother’s and grandmother’s handwriting. Seeing this tin brought me back to the days when I holidayed to the Netherlands and stayed at mum’s house. In the evenings we stitched together for hours. We concentrated on our project, while enjoying the soft sound of music in the background, mixed with the clanging of this tin when my mother picked out a new thread. This was the best time of the day.
From a young age I learned all the skills from Mum, like it usually happened in those days. Knitting, crochet, hand and machine sewing, you name it, it was all spoon fed, down to the next generation. My mother and I bonded over textiles; it was our ‘glue’, our shared language.
As a rule I decided to use all the threads from the tin box and ‘pour’ them into these cloths. This meant that I could not finish Still because the white thread ran out. And I had to complete Generations, my mother’s family-story, with another vintage thread, dating from the time I was a child. And the same thing counts for the portraits; here only the thicker grey thread is from the tin. My mother’s little preserving jar contains the thread ends – only the ones from the tin, because I found it too hard to throw them away.
Another limiting fact is the size of the cloth. Generations does not tell the complete story because I ran out of surface. Luckily the description of my grandparent’s life is included, … just.
I created Stored in complete silence, to allow me to build a connection with the work, to concentrate on the things I wanted to express and to make space for memories and emotions. In tiny books I wrote thoughts that popped up during the process. I am going to assemble these to serve as a plinth for the preserving jar.
I began with this work in 2023 – the long and slow process served me well. Making this work helped me move through grief of our family. The family that was … and never was. I love my family members unconditionally, even though the five of us were very different in character. Our parents organised exciting activities, outings and holidays when we grew up, which are all treasured memories. They did their best, but our connection remained thin. Over the decades this bond was regularly challenged and some parts are permanently broken.
I have chosen to keep these cloths folded and stacked, like a still life. As with memories, only the beholder can recall them. While the full content of the story is unreachable, the chapters relate, the cloths connect with each other, and their delicate edges are evident.
—— written by me and not by AI, just saying —–