issue 109 Rise Up r o t t a

Gj o n e s. P h o t o b y To m s e L

o r k b y Å

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We asked our contributors:

How do textiles enrich and elevate your life?

Rhonda Brown p.66

I have the good fortune to live among dozens of handmade works of art – woven, plaited, pieced. A favorite is the elemental stitch in embroidery. It moves me on a visceral level – in stitched drawings by Caroline Bartlett, jeweltoned geometric embroideries by Scott Rothstein and Heidrun Schimmel’s blizzards of white stitches on black silk. Maybe it’s the confluence of hand, heart and eye. Maybe it’s the memories stitching triggers – personal and historical. Mine goes back to the ‘Now I lay me down to sleep’ sampler I had as a child, embroidery offers a sense of coming home.

Annie O. Waterman p.54

When looking at a textile, it's tricky to pinpoint what draws me to it. Sometimes, it’s the design. More often though, it’s a sense of the human hands that produced it and my curiosity to know more about the maker. For me, textiles communicate identity. You can better understand a society’s cultural heritage by examining their textiles. They tell stories that are shared between people. A piece reflects something – whether it’s emotions, histories, values, or memories. Textiles become living treasures, time capsules that express something beautiful about who we are and the past woven within and between us.

Liz Hoggard p.40

Growing up in the West Midlands in the 1970s, there wasn’t an awful lot of colour and adornment. In my mind, the 1970s is a grainy monochrome movie. But visiting my grandmother, I adored going through her dressing-up box, full of embroidered and appliquéd fabrics. Even today I have a magpie attraction to shiny things – a longing perhaps for a childhood that never quite existed. Fortunately maximalism is having a moment – so I’m out and proud. Pattern really is lifeenhancing. No. More. Monochrome.

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