One of the great things to have come out of my Stitched Time project has been that the artists involved have formed a loose group, which can expand and shrink and whose members flag up interesting events to go to together. As a result some of us went to see The Song of the Shirt at the Gulbenkian in May and most recently we went to Eye of the Needle, Art, Stitch, Partnerships and Protest at the British Librar. The panel discussion with Cornelia Parker, Susan Stockwell, Sarah Corbett and Ele Carpenter was chaired by Sue Prichard from the V&A and explored the way in which stitch can give those without a voice a powerful means of expressing political resistance.
As the event was in the evening, I made a day of it and visited Tate Modern with Gwen, one of the stitched time artists. I was shocked by the number of new developments that seem to crowd the site – just shows how long it has been since I was there. We managed to catch the wonderfully inspiring Sonia Delauney retrospective – in the context of my recent forays into encaustics, I had a particularly close look at some of hers. Having only seen a couple of pieces of her work in Paris what seems an absolute age ago I had been unaware and truly ignorant of how her art crossed boundaries and touched all aspects of creative practice and the business of making a living.
