Lock Screen

2022

I think of the subtitle of this piece as “Put down your phone and stitch something”. This piece of fabric was originally intended to be a tea towel, but it had a printing flaw so I had put it in a pile of scrap fabrics. One evening, in an effort to give myself a break from the world news, I put down my phone, picked this up and started stitching. It became a kind of evening meditation doodling with different hand embroidery stitches with no pattern or plan. I decided to finish it in the shape of my phone to represent that “lock screen” of the phone at rest as I stitched. The illustration is a drawing I did of my puppy Stanley when he was about 6 months old. It was digitally printed on to linen fabric and hand embroidered with perle cotton thread.

This piece was exhibited as part of the Cling show at Art Works in 2022-23. Instead of showing the pieces, the gallery asked for detailed photos which they printed on to giant stickers. They installed these all over the walls and floors of the gallery. Stanley appeared in several places and one of the staff members told me that people liked to come over and pat the Stanley sticker that covered the top of a large pedestal. I loved how people could really look up close at the embroidery stitches, which were about 3x their original size.