Mapping ecologies of home...standing between past and present, death and life, the conscious and the unconscious, expressed and sealed for eternity

Curator Anda Klaviņa wrote these words for her Ruins exhibition catalogue. She invited me to contribute a walk for the exhibition and I formulated a few thoughts trying to weave together ideas from recent readings. For my first attempt at embroidery (as an adult), I was thinking about politics and how closely embroidery is linked to geography. For the walk, I wore an apron made from an old canvas, a recycled painting embroidered with my rough attempt (1). Embroidery as continuity and resistance, ‘feeling the support of my ancestors’, to quote Ukrainian singer Alina Pash (2) who talks about embroidery as ‘the code of our people and kind’. I remember learning how to embroider as a child — a traditional Latvian geometric design. I found it interesting to see the geographical border between ornamental geometric and organic patterns (3). My grandmother embroidered the shirt I wore in childhood (4), a copy of one she made for herself as a refugee, by unpicking a black wool sweater and using the wool to embroider linen. This story of my family’s exile and my own attempts at finding home have been at the forefront of my early creative practice and I wonder, if through embroidery, and watching and feeling this year of Russian aggression, is a way back to this question but from my current position.

I wore the apron for my walk ‘Between Surface and Absorption’ from the centre of Trapani, Sicily to the ruins of the coastal tuna factory, just outside town. (5-9). We were a group of ten people, and our story began with footsteps that weave places together (de Certeau), we become engineers cutting streets (Benjamin) through to the past. A protest walk, a demonstration of hope (Solnit and Butler). Butler writes: “when bodies assemble on the street, in the square, or in other public venues is the exercise-one might call it performative-of the right to appear, a bodily demand for a more liveable set of lives.”

Coincidentally, artists refusing to participate in the ‘high’ art of Social Realism during Soviet times turned their attention to textile and applied arts. The title of my walk refers to different states; of staying on the surface or being absorbed within. I’m thinking here of memory and layering of history, also the quality of different art materials: some stay on the surface while others are absorbed. This walk began on the surface, our footsteps touched the pavement and drew lines, connecting us with this time and place.

Benjamin, W. (2016) One-Way Street. Edited by M. W. Jennings. Cambridge: The Belknapf Press of Harvard University Press. (Originally published in 1928)

Butler, J. (2015) Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

de Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley: University of California Press

Leimanis, I. (2006) ‘Home?’, Locus Suspectus: Uncanny Sites of Visual Culture, (2) pp. 28-29, 32.

Paine, S. (2008) Embroidered Textiles: A World Guide to Traditional Patterns. London: Thames and Hudson.

Pash, A. (2022) ‘An Embroidered Shirt’ [Instagram]. 19 May. Available at: https://www.instagram.com/p/CdvpqjbM43v/ (Accessed: 19 May 2022).

Solnit, R. (2000) Wanderlust: A History of Walking. New York: Granta Books.

Vinok Collective (2022) ‘Vyshyvankas’ [Instagram]. 18 March. Available at: https://www.instagram.com/p/CbOeIjXJf-S/ (Accessed 19 May 2022).

My presentation starts at 2.38.02
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcPmP3zUOR0