Sewing | Kate McCalmont-Woods

I wanted to make some marks – layers of marks – and so I took some A2 paper and used charcoal, pastel, an eraser and a pen.

It wasn’t meant to be anything. I thought that I might use it as a base for something else. I had been wanting to have another go at overprinting the linocut image from Never Say Never. In that post I comment that the shapes look like crouching figures – in retrospect they are foetal-like. The subject of microchimerism has come back to my mind recently and I thought that the idea of making the ink more transparent with each print could touch on that. Also, the marks underneath would also become increasingly visible. I gave it a go but I made a hash of the ratio of ink to extender, and I couldn’t find the new tube of extender so I just added some white which, of course, made the print totally opaque, which wasn’t the original intention.

I left it for a while and got on with other tasks relating to the book and when I revisited it I thought about umbilical chords (something I have referenced previously in Sisters). I thought I might use some of the red thread that I had for my paper experiments to sew some kind of twisting chords which then made me think of using black stitching to delineate between the three shapes. I used a blanket stitch on the second shape as I’d seen at her Tate Modern exhibition that Tracey Emin had used it on her blankets to give a less defined line.

I’m really chuffed. I was thinking as I was sewing that maybe I should have planned where I was going to go, but then decided that, no, I liked the spontaneity of it all. Would I have done anything differently? No. How did I feel as I was making it? I felt pleasure, at all stages. I enjoyed the making of it and I like how it turned out. In fact, over the last few months (Summer Exhibition aside) I have really enjoyed making. That’s not to say that I haven’t enjoyed the process of making before then – I have, particularly the experimenting and and the wandering, it’s just that recently I have felt contented, as if some things have fallen into place. I particularly enjoyed the experiments with lino cuttings and packaging, and I’m really happy with the video that I made.

I think that it comes down to the accidental and the incidental; the unexpected that happens in the process and the small things I notice within the process which then lead to something else.

In the accident, a 2 inch piece of glass managed to find its way into my daughter’s thumb via the underside of her wrist (luckily missing her artery) severing the main nerve and two tendons in her dominant right hand. Fortunately, she was taken to Salisbury Hospital, the regional centre for plastics. We make the 2 hour round trip every week for dressing changes and physiotherapy. Every week I take a photograph of her wound, mapping its healing, but also so that she can look at it when we get back home – she can’t look at her hand in the moment. It’s important that she reconnects her brain to her hand otherwise the hand map in her brain will be lost, as will any chance of recovering as much sensation as possible. Whilst some of the physio has been physical exercises to rehabilitate movement in the tendons, the majority of it is brain training: visualisation and mirroring exercises, analysing touch and sensation, using the good hand to teach the injured hand how things feel, teaching the brain the new language with which the hand is trying to communicate.

So, we decided that we would make something. I’ve been meaning to try out some tetrapak printing for a while. The process of incising seemed appropriate. I feel some responsibility – if I hadn’t suggested that she leave earlier, perhaps it wouldn’t have happened. The act of sewing, holding things together, helping things to heal.

I like that the wound is the subject, that the hand is suggested by the embossing. I debated whether to add more detail, more variety of tone but for once went with the less is more option. I used ordinary cotton thread but we decided that the colour wasn’t right so we went for embroidery thread – a brighter blue. As I was sewing I knew that it was too thick, that I should have separated it, but I just kept going. I knew it was wrong; she said it was wrong because now she couldn’t see the wound – I had obliterated the very thing that we were supposed to be embracing. I tried a couple more times until we decided that it was right. By then the holes were quite large but that in itself doesn’t matter – it reinforces the idea that often we have to endure further harm or pain in order to heal.