Linen is so domestic and versatile, this remanent could be from a bed sheet, a shirt, a dress anything – a piece of material that has been touched by the skin of someone loved and lost.

My piece has an obvious references to Kintsugi – the Japanese art of mending ceramics with gold, treating a breakage as part of the history of an object. The cracks and repairs as an event in the life of the objects rather than allowing its service to end at the time of its damage. The aesthetic of Kintsugi is beautiful it has a stillness that is calming.

This piece instead of being perfect in its imperfection, I wanted show the messiness of loss.

I wanted to show the deep, black tear loss makes, the deep bruise it leaves behind and the triumph as being the attempts we make to live with it. A repair that can hold you together when things will never be the same again.

With its messy over stitching as a representation of going through the actions and emotions over and over, sometimes being able to pull the edges together, get to the to the other side and filling the gaps. But sometimes not, where one stitch falls short a stitch that was put there at some other time is holding on and sometimes there are just holes that can’t be filled but they are not getting any bigger.