This post comes from Australia where I’m currently on a teaching tour organised by Fibre Arts Australia. I’m teaching my Stitching Connection class in New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria and am currently in the Adelaide Hills.
While up at all hours with terrible jet lag I read Jeanette Winterson’s latest Substack post, which I loved. A beautiful meditation on process over product and that ‘writing begins with listening’. Discombobulated by the time shift and long journey this sentence really helped me through my first workshop on the coast of northern New South Wales and the sudden shift from a UK heatwave into the dark and relative cool of Australian winter.
I began really listening to the very different sounds of the dawn chorus here - and stitching a simple sound map to reflect it. The Pied Currawong started the show and thanks to my Merlin bird id app one morning I heard 22 different bird calls in the space of an hour. Very different sounds to the magpies, blackbirds and wood pigeons that live near my urban terraced house in West Yorkshire.
The black silk thread I use to map the sounds is very fine, I liken it to drawing with a fine black ink pen. Linen is always my favourite material for durational stitching and mark making. The listening begins with a few birds, building to a crescendo of many. The simplest straight stitches are like punctuation marks in a language I don’t understand.
Making a material accompaniment to my visit and using it as a visual record of my travels ties in strongly to the themes of my new book Reflective Stitch: Time and Place in Textile Art which is published by Batsford on the 3rd September this year. It offers ways of working with these big themes, ways of starting where you are and using textile processes to capture and explore. It is available to preorder now.
On Thursday 10th September I’ll be speaking at Stitching for Wellbeing with fellow Batsford authors Deena Beverly, Jessie Cutts and Catherine-Marie Longtin at The Museum of the Home. This is part of London Textile Month.
My exhibition Stitching Praxis, first shown as part of BIEN, the Slovenian Textile Biennial, will be at the Batsford Gallery, Hackney, Wednesday 9th - Sunday 13th September.
I’ll be teaching in the gallery on Saturday 12th September, more details here.
Bookings open for my next online Material Thinking course next month. Paid subscribers receive early access and a price reduction.
Thanks again for supporting my work.
Welcome to the Mount Lofty Ranges (I don’t let Adelaide claim these hills 😉). The birdsong here is fabulous and has informed many notebook drawings in a similar way to your stitching. My alarm clock makes a warbly bird noise too, and a few days ago attracted a grey shrike thrush to the rose bush outside my open window. It was convinced there was an invader and did its best to dominate the airwaves (and very beautifully too). Enjoy your time here.
“I listen and learn.”