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.

 

This embroidery was made over many days and weeks, keeping company with my brother who was in palliative care. The front is a tablecloth, the back is a remnant from my mother’s shroud. And yet I wanted the artwork to be more than just cloth and stitches. As a photograph, it reveals more than the eye can see. Flooded with light, the three layers are revealed at once – front, back and the space within, where beginnings and ends of threads reside.

giclee print on Hahnemühle Rag