Heart of the Matter

Interview

by Brinda Gill

Embroidery Magazine May/June 2019

In het mei/juni 2019 nummer van Embroidery Magazine staat een uitgebreid interview met mij over mijn werk.

May/June 2019 issue of Embroidery Magazine

Embroidery Magazine May/June 2019

In this issue……

Editor, Jo Hall, says:

We’ve all experienced that feeling of peace when we’re absorbed so entirely in a task that time seems to melt away and we’re completely present to what we’re doing. The artist Archana Pathak (p. 34) has spent much of her life in different places and her creativity has helped her make sense of this. It touched me when I read her words “Hand for me is my source of making connections, and hand sewing with the bare minimum of tools in absolute silence is like a spiritual practice and more than just making. It gives me a space to quieten down and listen deeply. We have so many demands on our time these days that I, for one, crave the simplicity of sitting still and losing myself in making for a few hours. It also struck me whilst reading James Fox’s article (p28) that when we feel obiged to force the work, it hardly ever flows but once we align our attention with our own creative direction it can move mountains and in this case, lead to a stunning new body of work.

“Basically one thing leads to another. So much is fortuitous” says Diana Springall (p46) whose modesty belies not only her work ethic but her generous championing of embroidery on behalf of the wider textile community over many decades. But I’ll give the final word to Flox den Hartog Jager, who describes the process of creativity so well, which she says arises “in the meditative process of cutting and cutting, composing and restoring, decorating in rhythm and repetition and may rightly be called slow art”. We couldn’t agree more.

Jo Hall