Events must link together

I wake up to another beautiful day – although cool – I feel in need of looking at my theoretical work – to see how this can create a foundation to my practical work. So I spend the day reading “The Subversive Stitch” and the sewing manuals. I find a quote from Louise Bourgeois, how events must fit together like the threads of a sweater.

I think of the traces of things that are gone, traces of homes, traces of the church, the graveyard incongruously full of huge trees.

I think of putting stills of the landscape and taking it and sewing into it, overlaying the images to a rhythm and beat of the spinning wheel sounds of the trees creaking and strands of singing.

There are traces here of ancient Welsh, Gaelic then English, names places. Buccleuch was a community with houses and a church, the hill is named after the church, the Burn is named after the church too.

There is a motte on the land, probably the first home of the Dukes of Buccleuch.

Traces of times past – but now the local school only has 3 children! Forestry has taken over, it is a huge farm. Rows and rows of ordered trees the taming of the landscape, but underneath the trees the ordered rows, moss has taken over.

Can I stitch the landscape back together? Reparation, the needle repairs.