the confidantes is a series of embroidered textile objects presented as photographs. A documentation of my father’s handkerchiefs, hand stitched in a patterned grid and backed with dyed cloth.
The backing cloths are remnants from ‘tender cloths’ made during my residency at Tender Funerals in Port Kembla, where I dyed upcycled cloth with funeral flowers donated by families. After their exhibition, the cloths were returned to Tender to use in their mortuary for people who came without family or who died in difficult circumstances, in a final act of care.
The wrappings, a residue of this process, have been paired with a handkerchief, in a gesture of shared remembering.
In the same way that the flower-dyed cloths arise from the generosity of others, the individual titles have also been gifted. Twenty-two women were invited to write a short text in relation to their own father. They have responded with open-heartedness and candour. The titles were found in amongst their words.
Flooded with light and captured in photographs, the three layers are revealed at once - the handkerchief on top, the dyed cloth behind and the internal space where beginnings and ends of threads reside.
a window, a tablecloth and three chairs is a photograph of an embroidery made at the bedside of my brother when he was in palliative care.
mother: This cloth belonged to my mother. Its place was on her small dining table, with one side folded down and three chairs around it. The table sat up against a window, looking out on her geraniums and beyond, the bay. In the distance, cranes worked the port, planes landing, planes taking off. Containers, vessels, bodies in space. Time and time over.
brother: now, I stitch in vigil. Time is of, is the essence. Creeps along and speeds past. I sit within its passage. The stitching is a counting, though I seem have lost track. The circling forms a holding pattern before dropping down to land. Suspended, high up over Kamay and her blue waters.