Page 80 - The Digital Cloth Holiday issue 2

My local sewing machine repair shop themselves to be enveloped and
(David Drummond Sewing Machines in absorbed. My pieces also demand close

Edinburgh, who are amazing and so proximity, I sew only centimetres from
incredibly helpful, wise and supportive) each work, as if examining the texture of
call me “The Tree Lady”. I have a bark by touch, I am only able to see what
long-held love of trees going right back to I have achieved by stepping back. Each
when I was tiny. The fascination is not an work is composed of tiny stitches, creating
academic one, it’s an instinctual one. I live my representations of these beings’ cell by
near the Royal Botanic Gardens in cell. The machine is noisy, I barely hear the
Edinburgh and spend hours up close with world beyond, my eyes focused on the tiny
their wonderful collection of trees, points where the thread appears and
often returning to the thought that if disappears. Creating these giants from
these were sculptures, we would look up such microscopic marks is a way of
in awe and disbelief that something so honouring their majesty, my attempt to

epic and beautiful could exist. But, come to terms with what they are, whether
worldwide, we often, at best, take them they are conscious of us, and our
for granted and, at worst, indiscriminately responsibilities to them and the natural
destroy them instead of cherishing and world.
protecting them. The horror of how we
treat trees is also something that fires my I take a lot of photos and tend to walk
practice. around looking up a lot of the time. It can
Trees are our giant protectors, they are take me ages to get anywhere if there are

beings that defend us, hold the earth good trees around! I look as I look and I
together. My work is an investigation of look. I make sketches too and will work
my relationship with this notion, how we at a piece on paper before committing
depend on them, how we are often to stitching. Once I know the design of
merciless in their destruction. Their a piece, I draw out simple guide lines on
presence dwarfs us, and if we do register the calico (I always use calico because it’s
at all, we are like insects, endlessly busy, strong but malleable and easy to
leading manic, futile lives, we come and manoeuvre) and go from there. It depends
go, and those trees we choose to protect, on the design but I often build the image
or ignore, live on, silent, dignified. up starting first with the trunks of the trees
The philosopher, Martin Buber, suggests and then, once they’re done, I do any ink
that if we refer to the world in terms of ‘I work that might be required - the blue of

and Thou’ rather than ‘I and It’ we the sky for example, or the backdrop of
suddenly apprehend new beings. When clouds, perhaps a green wash to create
you look at it this way, trees become depth in the forest, on top of which I then
considered as unique individuals, each stitch. So, there is an element of actual
one ‘you’ rather than ‘it’ and they become painting, but 90% of any piece is stitched.
known to us in an entirely different way.
It is the sense of living alongside a race How long a piece takes depends on the
of ‘others’, who surround us but who we size and complexity. There’s no getting

can never fully comprehend, that I want away from the fact that this is a very
to convey in my work. I try and make my time-consuming practice. A small simple
pieces an immersive experience - I want to piece might just take a day or two whereas
viewer to have the feeling that they’re a very large, complex piece can take weeks
entering into another realm: allowing or months of work.