Exile Textile
101 x 87cm
Hand stitched fabric scraps
Started 31st March, finished 29th September, 2020.
In March 2020 my Mam rang and told me she had terminal cancer. I took all of my annual holiday allowance from one job (osteopath’s receptionist), cancelled my monthly shifts from the other (zero hours contract at the National Portrait Gallery) and went north, to a home I couldn’t wait to get away from 36 years earlier. Three hundred miles from where I live in South London.
One week after I arrived, my Dad had a stroke and my Mam had her first chemo. Two weeks after I arrived, the country went into Lockdown. Six weeks after I arrived, the PM said we were past the peak of the pandemic. I ended up living there for over a year.
It didn’t take long before I had lost both jobs and become my parents’ carer. And so it was that Exile Textile began, in the most miserable of circumstances. Stitching in secret in the early hours of the morning with materials I found around the house. Recording my time there and hanging onto my sanity.
Mam died in April 2021.
Below is an explanation of the different sections. Following that are some screenshots from Instagram, as I documented its making in real time, and some photographs of the materials used.
FURLOUGHED A new word to me. I was furloughed for two months, then couldn’t live with the guilt of taking the money and gave notice.
The CROSSED-OUT NUMBERS, cut from an old wash bag, represent Mam’s chemo. She had 9 sessions. When Dad got home after his stroke, Mam said we should throw that bloody wash bag out. It was only ever used for hospital visits, and I’m 92% certain that I had it with me in 1974 when I had my tonsils extracted at Sunderland General. The black crosses came from my sister’s Dorothy Perkins’ trousers, as do all the black bits. The yellow background is from Mam’s massive duster collection, as are all the yellow bits.
COVID-19, LOCKDOWN and SECOND HOME ESCAPEES, speak for themselves. The red fabric came from Mam’s under-the-bed stash. Sometimes she did Christmas Craft Fairs and had lots of red, green and white fabric for such occasions.
WHERE HAVE ALL THE FLOURS GONE? began with ‘flowers’, a song (Seeger/Hickerson) that went viral. I intended to change ‘flowers’ to ‘crisps’ because I was ordering hundreds of bags and they were gone the day after delivery. Simon Wood on Instagram suggested I change it to ‘flours’, which was brilliant, on account of lots of people making bread and the shops running out of flour. The background is a tote bag for a festival my sister went to by mistake. She thought she was going to the Eden Festival, which is a huge music festival in Scotland. About half an hour into the journey she discovered she was on her way to the Eden Escape Festival, a yoga thing in Cumbria. She put the bag in the bin and I took it out.
STAY ALERT TO BULLSHIT and STAY HOME BUT GAN OOT is in reference to the daily conflicting advice from the government.
JUNETEENTH dates back to 1865. ‘It commemorates the day when 250,000 slaves in the state of Texas, which became the last bastion for slavery during the final days of the Civil War, were declared free by the U.S. Army’. I’m ashamed to say I hadn’t heard of it until June 2020.
A SUPPORT BUBBLE ‘is a support network that links 2 households. You do not need to maintain social distancing with people in your support bubble. However, maintaining social distance and taking other precautions such as washing hands and opening windows will help reduce the spread of coronavirus’. I used one of Dad’s 672 unopened boxes of handkerchiefs for the letters.
WHEN YOU WALK THROUGH A STORM Lyrics from You’ll Never Walk Alone (Rodgers and Hammerstein), the anthem for Liverpool FC, who had won the Premier League with no fans there to celebrate. My husband and son are life long supporters and I hadn’t seen them for four months at this point. I was in a storm, too.
2020 with a cross through it, is because I was rejected from the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. And also because 2020 was a complete write-off. An old sheet stitched to an ‘embarrassing’ tea towel my friend threw away.
THE R NUMBER was all the rage during the pandemic. ‘An R value of 1 means that on average every person who is infected will infect 1 other person, meaning the total number of infections is stable. If R is 2, on average, each infected person infects 2 more people’. The background is a jaycloth.
19 WEEKS is pretty self explanatory. The length of time I’d been there, without leaving the house, at the time of stitching . I used one of my old work uniforms.
CLAP FOR THE CARER/CAREER GIRL is in reference to all the clapping we were doing for the overworked and underpaid NHS workers. I am the ‘carer girl’, my sister the ‘career girl'.
I CAN’T BREATHE are the dying words of George Floyd on 25th May, 2020. He was killed by a Minneapolis police officer who kneeled on his neck for over eight minutes. Mam and Dad always kept charity shop clothes for the kids at their house, on account of us not having a car and not being able to carry much. I used one of my son’s t-shirts
LOW SKILLED WORKERS became KEY WORKERS, but are now back to being unappreciated ‘low skilled’ workers again.
PPE (personal protective equipment), an abbreviation of which I hadn’t previously heard, was a hot topic in 2020, and still is because some people made a corrupt fortune out of it.
TAKE THE KNEE (‘a symbolic gesture against racism’) is because of Dominic Raab saying he would only take the knee for his wife or the Queen.
Prints available here.
Main image by Phil Shelly. Prints available here.
