Portrait after loss (unpicked handkerchiefs 2020-2025), installation.

“Portrait after loss” explores loss, resilience and growth through the language of unpicked threads. It consists of a floor-based drawing using threads from unwoven handkerchiefs to form a web around a central hole. A series of cyanotypes accompany the threads, showing the unpicking process. Stemming from personal experience of grief, the work recognises our capacity to accept change and grow around absence.

As the handkerchiefs are unpicked they lose their form and function and are reduced to a pile of threads. Free from the constraints of woven cloth, they are transformed into a delicate web, supporting one another loosely. Suggestive of a more organic state, the web speaks of fragility and strength, presence and absence, loss and transformation. 

This piece forms part of a wider practice in which I use the unpicking of cloth as a metaphor to consider processes of collapse and regeneration. Through this process, I pull pieces of fabric apart, slowly un-weaving the fibres to make piles of threads that I use to to construct new narratives, transforming this purposeful destructive act into one of creation. This practice reclaims slowness and process, questioning a world that values doing over being, commodities over time, end product over process.

The act of undoing challenges and unsettles. As global collapse seems to grow ever closer, this work reflects a need to unravel constructed narratives, and find threads that connect us to a more authentic set of values. Threads that reveal our interconnection with natural rhythms, offering a less rigid, more fluid state, adaptable to change. Through pulling things apart we find that which is indestructible; threads of resilience.

“Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.”
Pema Chödrön, ‘When things fall apart’

Other pieces that form this body of work include “Numb” and “Invisible threads”