artist statement

I like to stitch.

Whether by hand or machine the core process of my work is stitching. The action of drawing fabrics together with thread and the labour and toil involved in order to create something handmade and personalised by me for another, has been a constant in my work as an artist.

I originate from a line of female textile workers based in the East Midlands, who heralded from the ‘Make-do and Mend’ philosophy of the Second World War in the 1940’s.  My maternal grandmother was a textile worker and worked in the hosiery factories of Derby from the 1950’s through to the 1970’s. Her particular skill lay in being able to mend and pick up ‘lost’ stitches in knitted garments and she was known as an ‘invisible mender’. My earliest memory of stitching and engaging with textiles was with my grandmother teaching me to sew a ‘peg bag’ as a surprise for my mother.  Here I began my fascination and love of thread.

I make and construct textile artefacts that are usually in the form of a non-functioning domestic object.  My work explores the stepping-stones of everyday life, giving a platform to seemingly unimportant moments.  With my work I want to reconnect people to their humanness, by this I mean that although there are many positives within the digital era in which we currently live, it can also manifest feelings of anonymity and be reductive.

In order to make a piece of work and give it content, I have developed a technique of emailing people asking them to respond to a particular notion or questions that have arisen for me in response to the world at large.  After gathering replies, I spend time thinking about what form the end textile piece will take.  I then construct with stitch, the artefact, using a mix of reclaimed fabrics, excerpts of emailed texts, and found ephemera.

Language operates as a conduit in my work, both in terms of communication and as a form of narrative.  I am interested in the physical construction of a word, a sentence, or a letter and the shapes these create. Gathering responses by email to a given subject, I observe what people write, how they choose to use particular words, and what is left unsaid. I read between the lines of what people write and in my process of making, the language they choose appears in some cases as text that features within or upon the textile piece in question.  I enjoy experimenting with the physical layering or secretion of the text onto or under the fabric surface using hand or machine stitching.  After I have made a piece of work for an exhibition, I am intrigued by the reading or mis-reading of the sewn text in my work by the viewer.

Lately, I have begun to make short films that either document my making process or feature a fictional narrative connected to the textile artefact concerned.

Julia O’Connell 2009