On cloth and the materialisation of trauma

and how art and cloth can lead us towards healing

Sometimes I can’t work with cloth, not whole cloth. Its blankness shuts me out, no invitation visible for where to start, to make a mark or stitch. Too perfect and uninviting, like a haughty, glossy mum at the school gate.

So I sit at my sewing desk and tear fabric up. New calico, salvaged cloths, remnants of clothes. A small snip with the scissors then tugging with almost desperate hands until the two edges come apart. The short straight cut grows into a long ragged gash. The beautiful symmetry of the weave is contorted then wrenched apart, warp and weft pulled adrift. Or set free.

And the sound of the cloth as it tears - a sound of here and now, almost animal. A little brutal, bringing me into the moment from the painful misty wanderings in memory.

What’s left is a heap of fragments. Where the cloth had laid flat and neat on my desk, these fragments seem alive, wriggling and writhing like a nest of snakes. Backs arched, their edges wildly frayed by the trauma of the tearing.

This I recognise. The perfect new cloth is an alien landscape but this mess and tangle of broken uneasiness? This I know.

Torn and tossed about by life then washed up, disorientated and newly formed - this is me.

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There is a curious empathy between cloth and the human soul. We use cloth metaphors to describe our everyday lives but when I work with it, cloth embodies me physically. It is a tabula rasa waiting to absorb my marks, stitches, folds. But its weave is also my embodiment. The uniformity of the weave holds me steady and mostly that’s good, yet when I start to feel confined, I can pull out the edges of the cloth, ease each fibre out of the weave. Create space. It is a setting free. What was once a loose and wriggling thread that had been put tightly in its place, is released to find its own way once again.

And when I tear the cloth - huge, angry tears that use my whole body - I release the trauma I am holding into the cloth. Edges ruptured, structure destroyed, flatness disrupted and wholeness shattered. Trauma, materialised.

What was flat now arches and curls in on itself.

What was orderly is now chaos.

What was known is now unknowable.

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When my husband died - took his own life - this is how I felt. Torn open, fragmented, discarded. The fabric of our lives had been wearing thin for some time as his mental illness took hold and yet we were still whole, joined by our marriage and our daughter and our incredulity at the nightmare we found ourselves in. The moment I received that phone call from police in another country, breaking the news, I heard the giant tearing sound as I was ripped from both my denial and my hope. I went in the garden and howled - it was late at night and I didn’t want to wake my tiny daughter - and by the time I came back inside, the illusion of wholeness was gone.

The next day, finding the words to tell others the news, I found words would not weave together as they used to. The order was gone, the known taken or hidden from me. Over the next days, weeks, months I watched speechless as the edges of my cloth rapidly frayed to nothingness.

We talk about a life ‘in tatters’ and there mine was, a heap of tatters; the fragile mends and patches and repairs all useless now.

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What was needed was not repair but healing.

How this happened is another - long - story but at its heart are these fragments of cloth and it started with the tearing. It turns out this urge to tear, the physical act of rending the weave apart, was not an act of destruction but, ultimately, one of healing.

Cloth listens, responds and expresses. I know now how important that is for healing the trauma. To be heard. To find a way to express and release it.

Then to come to see the beauty in those enduring fragments.

And, most of all, to see the possibility of them coming together - eventually - in a new whole.

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Credit: Artist Beverly Ayling-Smith writes about ‘the materialisation of trauma’ in textiles work and I am indebted to her writing for finding ways to understand my own work with cloth. You can find her work and writing here. I have particularly referred to her introduction to the journal Textile: Cloth and Culture Vol 21 2023 on Textiles and Trauma which can be found here, and part of her PhD research published in the same journal in 2019 here

In these posts I am exploring new ways of writing about my art making and how it connects with life in general. As an artist, I work in many different media - drawing, paint, collage, cloth - but cloth and stitching have a particular place in my practice at the moment as I am completing a Textiles degree.

If this speaks to you, please do leave a comment. I have elected to share my writing here on Substack to connect with others who share my interest in aesthetics, making and the healing processes of making art. Thank you.