Sculpture & Installation > Unfoldment
Unfoldment
Unfoldment (2018) - X-Marks: Conversations in Cloth, Te Kōngahu Museum of Waitangi, Bay of Islands
Jane Kendall and the Legacy of Silence
It can be said that embroidery is a language that is silent – language, when silent is thought. [1] The gendered historical picture of the embroiderer is one of head bowed in silent concentration that suggested the submissive, subjective, modest and domestic feminine. Another perspective that suits what we know of Jane Kendall is that of a strong woman, quietly self-contained, autonomous…thinking.[2]
The stitched thread is an additive mark of the maker similar to that of the painters’ brush stroke.[3] These symbolic ‘marks’ hold the physical presence of the artists’ explorations while the repetitive process retains the evidence of the intensity of the making. This ritual and repetition can act as an antidote to isolation and despair; it can become a guard against vulnerability or as a means of containing anger. [4]
The work ‘Unfoldment’ imagines the stitches that may have emerged from Jane’s journey into a new world through her interactions with Māori women. The repetitive finger weaving, twining, binding and stitching is a physical enactment of time and a tangible record no less meaningful because of the absence of words. It explores the veiled space between known, unknown, imagined, recorded, physical, spiritual. Feathers and stitches guide us through the recorded events of Jane’s life; marriage, births, deaths, arrivals, departures, creating a sense of an unfolding lifetime in the ‘unwritten’ pages.
The objects I make in cloth speak, shout, whisper, breathe in a language of silence. Jane Whitely
Jane Kendall and the Legacy of Silence
It can be said that embroidery is a language that is silent – language, when silent is thought. [1] The gendered historical picture of the embroiderer is one of head bowed in silent concentration that suggested the submissive, subjective, modest and domestic feminine. Another perspective that suits what we know of Jane Kendall is that of a strong woman, quietly self-contained, autonomous…thinking.[2]
The stitched thread is an additive mark of the maker similar to that of the painters’ brush stroke.[3] These symbolic ‘marks’ hold the physical presence of the artists’ explorations while the repetitive process retains the evidence of the intensity of the making. This ritual and repetition can act as an antidote to isolation and despair; it can become a guard against vulnerability or as a means of containing anger. [4]
The work ‘Unfoldment’ imagines the stitches that may have emerged from Jane’s journey into a new world through her interactions with Māori women. The repetitive finger weaving, twining, binding and stitching is a physical enactment of time and a tangible record no less meaningful because of the absence of words. It explores the veiled space between known, unknown, imagined, recorded, physical, spiritual. Feathers and stitches guide us through the recorded events of Jane’s life; marriage, births, deaths, arrivals, departures, creating a sense of an unfolding lifetime in the ‘unwritten’ pages.
The objects I make in cloth speak, shout, whisper, breathe in a language of silence. Jane Whitely