All the materials used here had a previous purpose and were made by unknown hands. Most started in pre-war China and followed an unplanned, uncharted course to my workroom in Bristol; who knows where the rest, scraps of shirts, handkerchiefs, nightdress, started out? The embroidered pieces were too beautiful to throw away, but too torn and fragile to use. The kantha principle of making something new and beautiful from scraps seemed appropriate. The piece encapsulates the notion that chance takes us to unexpected places and situations, and life was ‘Uncharted’ all the time.
Vintage embroidered table and bed linen; recycled cotton and linen garments, in all three layers. Hand stitch, kantha style using modern and vintage embroidery threads. The words on the back were chosen because, as I stitched, I was thinking about how our lives are shaped by random chance, sometimes in good ways and sometimes not. ‘Unstructured – Restructured’ is what has happened to all the fabrics in the piece, and sometimes to us as well.
