Embroidering the Everyday (eBook)

My fraternal grandmother talks about her everyday life on the road as a Romani child. The places where her family stopped and worked are part of my history. The fields where she once picked fruit and hops are part of my regular cycle route in Kent. I often walk along the North Norfolk coast paths and the broad estuary of the Wash when visiting family, and have visited the back lanes and markets of Norwich where my great-grandmother once touted crocheted table mats and lace ware, as part of my route home from school. I live in a small house on the outskirts of Maidstone, and by any description may be perceived as a ‘settled’ member of the community. However, my art practice and lifestyle choice contradicts this. I travel in pursuit of my work, drawing, stitching, collecting and collating things as I go. I don’t own a car; you could say I ‘walk the world’. My main mode of transport is on foot or by bicycle. This immediately connects me to the places I travel through, taking in the stories of people, culture and place along the way. My way of thinking and my approach to my work is constantly in motion and being challenged by this daily exchange with the ‘world outside’.

We travelled gently along the road and lanes by our two horse-drawn caravans, the vardo and the Leeds wagon. Usually we made our way from village to village, our stops were made on ‘pull-ins’ in the quiet lanes or our regular Stopping Places. I remember picking spring daffodils and tulips in fields near Spalding, the area called Little Holland. In Kent we picked apples, plums and hops. We saw the Irish Sea, the North Sea, the Wash and the Channel, the Cheviots, the Pennines, the Downs and the Lakes. Romanis still travelling follow the same routes, gathering in the old familiar places.

From ‘Memories of a Romani Childhood’, Mary Holmes (1994). Share Your Memories writing competition, Norfolk County Council, Library and Information.

A traditional name for a traveller in Ireland ‘An Lucht Siúil’ translates as ‘the Walking People’.

The places and landscapes I ‘walk through’ are reflected in the imagery and materials I collect and use. The connection to my family is represented symbolically in these pieces through the image of a kettle. Pani Kekkavva is the traditional term for an iron kettle in the Romani language; it was hung over an open fire as they settled down at the end of the day on the road. ‘Putting the kettle on’ is a welcome sign of companionship and discussion, carrying with it, memories of my grandmother’s house and childhood stories told over a ‘cuppa’, igniting my imagination and a thriftiness in what I use.

As I matured I began, as Gran would say, to ‘grow into myself’ and found new confidence in drawing upon my Romani cultural background. Research in India helped with a greater understanding of the roots of my heritage. Re-purposing things is in my blood, salvaging items from wherever I can find them. We have become careless in our care of this shared world.

The stories and imagery to be found in the everyday and commonplace are a constant source of inspiration for projects and collaborations. As Moira Vincentelli said about my process:

Her work often contains snippets of text or discarded materials that have associations or conjure up memories. There is always a dialogue with the materials she uses. They bring their own history which is woven into the work. These collections of ephemera might seem meaningless but their apparent banality is open-ended. They are available to stimulate the imagination through the poetry of ordinariness. Everything has a connection and each viewer makes their own connections.’

From an essay written for ‘Reflections’
(an early exhibition by the author),
Moira Vincentelli.

The representation of flora, fauna, the paraphernalia of daily life, landscape and seasonal changes draws its own associations with nature and freedom. Throughout her life, my grandmother always had roses in her garden and in the decoration on much of the beautiful china in her house. These memories of her objects resonate with the decoration of traditional caravans and barge art of many travelling communities. Similar imagery is still to be found in the décor of Romani homes today.

The references we make to the familiar, to personal histories, are a rich resource for us all to work with. The black-and-white images, of my own family, faded with time, echo a bygone age. I wanted to capture that sense of time and place in transferring these images to cloth.

Image to cloth

I employ a number of approaches when applying images onto cloth, depending on the outcome I want to achieve. Many of the images in the ‘Places, Traces, Spaces’ series used oil-based printing and paint mediums to transfer the printed image to cloth. The process is messy and unreliable yet, after lengthy experimentation, it produced the degraded image I was after. One of the simplest ways to obtain an image is to use commercial photo transfer paper, which you can run through a printer and then iron onto the cloth. Alternatively, you could use a transfer gel medium such as Dylon Image Maker.

In the series ‘Shadows’ the photographic portraits of my family were run through a printer and transferred directly onto cloth or strong but lightweight Japanese papers, which were later attached to the cloth with glue paste or stitch (as described opposite). Conservation tissues or Tissuetex also work well. Before printing, the text and portrait of my grandmother are digitally reversed and enhanced through software to bring out the contrasts.