JUDY STEPHENS

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And Then It's Too Late

I have been working with fabric portraits.  This piece is a response to something deeply troubling which I saw.  I turned drawn silhouettes into faced cotton ‘heads’, sewed them into a row and then free machine quilted them, leaving 3D profiles.  A thin blue horizontal ‘sightline’ was hand-stitched with blue thread, ending in a cut knot with splayed ends.  In retrospect I can see the influence of Mark Gertler’s painting Merry-go-round which first touched me when I was a schoolgirl and also a tapestry-covered head by Louise Bourgeois.


I was surprised by how personal this impersonal long, thin, challenge shape became.


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