Sewing Stories and Unpicking Them (2021)

Documents from a Performance

A performance piece in which I stitched an event from my day into a cloth book, before revisiting the work 24 hours later and unpicking the thread. Left behind were the holes and marks in the cloth.

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The work aims to address the importance of memory in oral traditions and the practice of storytelling, before the advent of phonograph recording in the 19th century. Testimonies were unreliably retold in a 'word of mouth' fashion, where anecdotal memory was inherently important. The transience of this is echoed in the interim period of 24 hours in which my anecdotes remain stitched in cloth; visible before being removed with little trace.