Wilderness Quilt
Festival Of Quilts 2020

If I Was In The Wilderness

During lockdown I was reading a lot of Brené Brown, including Braving the Wilderness, and thinking about vulnerability, courage and what it means to feel exposed. The title came from a very literal thought. If I was in the wilderness, I would need a quilt or blanket to keep me warm and protect me. That idea made me smile, but it also felt serious enough to build a piece around. I stitched a label into the work: ‘Wilderness Quilt: use in an emergency.’ It became both an instruction and a little bit of reassurance.

One stitched element was my direct response to Brené Brown’s ‘Permission Slips’ activity in Dare to Lead. Instead of completing it on paper, I stitched my own permission slip into the quilt. That mattered because the thinking did not stay separate from the making. I answered the exercise through cloth and stitch, and the response became part of the surface of the work.

I had also seen stitched work by Tracey Emin and talked about it with members of the Embroiderers’ Guild, which I belonged to at the time. Some people thought her work poor and crude. I did not. I liked it and understood something in it, although I was unsure what that meant for my own work. When I sat down on the floor and began stitching instinctively, the writing, uneven marks and directness of feeling came out in a way that felt akin to hers. I was not trying to imitate her. I was discovering that my own natural textile language was less interested in polishing emotion away.

I was also interested in Lorina Bulwer’s stitched texts. The intensity of words carried directly through cloth made sense to me. I was becoming increasingly drawn to textile work that could hold difficult thought, repetition and feeling without tidying them into something more comfortable. Bulwer and Emin were very different references, but both helped me recognise that stitch could carry a voice as well as an image.

Every Stitch Carried Meaning

Most of the quilt was made by hand, with some free machine embroidery. I did not have a table or studio space large enough to hold it, so much of the work happened on the floor. The stitching became a physical record of how I felt. When I was tense the stitches could be short and tight. At other times they became longer and easier. I was not aiming for a consistent stitch because consistency was not the point. The rhythm, pressure and density were carrying the mood with me.

Everything in the quilt was reused or recycled, but nothing was casual or random. Every piece, fragment, scrap and design mattered because it captured something of that time. I was careful about what went where, while allowing old cloth, worn edges, writing and earlier histories to remain visible. The surface grew slowly through decisions that were small on their own but became huge through repetition. That is why I still think of the making as therapy. I was stitching feeling into cloth rather than trying to make the feeling disappear.

I was working things through as I stitched. Images, words and pieces of cloth that already meant something to me kept finding their way into the quilt. A textile my mother had brought back for me from a trip to China became the starting point for the hand stitched worker figures. Just before making the quilt I had visited Japan; ties brought back from Kyoto became part of the work itself, while textile designs I had seen in a Kyoto factory fed into its colour, pattern and rhythm. Brené Brown’s permission slip was another example of the same process: something I was thinking about became something I answered in stitch. None of these things felt separate from what I was experiencing. Making the quilt was part of how I was trying to understand it.

My original 2020 Wilderness Quilt blog catches the work while I was still inside that experience. I wrote then about nine weeks spent either at the sewing machine or on my hands and knees hand stitching, and about how physically and emotionally demanding it had been. Amelia Horton at King Edward VI College helped me photograph the piece, while Anne Bruntlett of Loose Threads had helped me understand the competition rules. I value that little record because it was written before I had hindsight or a neat explanation for what I was doing.

Festival Of Quilts 2020

The physical Festival Of Quilts had been due to take place at the NEC in Birmingham from 30 July to 2 August 2020, with around 26,000 visitors expected. Covid stopped the live event, but the competition continued online and attracted more than 650 entries. Wilderness Quilt went into the Art Quilt category. Sitting at home and seeing it in the virtual gallery felt enormous. My blog from the day simply records the buzz of seeing the work there, which is probably a better description than anything more polished I could invent now.

The entry deadline did not make the quilt finished. I carried on working on it into 2021 because that is often how I work: if I can still see another possibility, I find it difficult to declare something closed. That continued making also explains why later exhibition records sometimes date Wilderness Quilt as 2021 rather than 2020. Both dates belong to its story.

Honoured & Uncertain At The NEC

When Wilderness Quilt was later hung at the NEC, I felt genuinely honoured to have my own work there. At the same time, I stood and watched people walk past my quilt and linger over work that appeared technically perfect. I do not know what those visitors thought. I only knew what I could see and how it made me feel. I came away with the sense that perfection was being celebrated more readily than effort, emotion and meaning. That hurt because I knew how much of myself was held in the stitches.

The experience made me sad, unsure and uncertain about where my work belonged. It was confusing because I was proud to be included and grateful for the opportunity. Those feelings did not cancel each other out. I could be honoured and hurt at the same time. I could question whether the work fitted and still know that I had made it honestly. But that quilt was me.

A Work That Kept Moving

Wilderness Quilt kept finding new places. In 2023 it was included in Textile Fantasies at Open Gallery in Halifax, where it was shown alongside my Divorce Quilt. Open Gallery lists Wilderness Quilt as 2021, which fits the fact that I carried on developing it after the first Festival entry rather than treating July 2020 as a hard stop.

After moving to Derbyshire I showed it again at Creative Connections in Alfreton as part of the Riddings Community Flax Project. That showing mattered for a different reason. I was beginning to build relationships in a new place and wanted people to see some of the work that had brought me there. The quilt became a way of introducing an earlier part of my practice rather than an object I had packed away as finished history.

What I Can See In It Now

With some distance, I can see threads in Wilderness Quilt that became much more deliberate later: reuse, visible process, vulnerability, instinctive stitching and a growing resistance to the idea that a textile has to hide its irregularity to have value. I did not have that language in 2020, and it would be false to write my later thinking backwards into the piece. What I had was an instinct and a need to make.

Those instincts continued into my wider approach to resourceful and carbon sensitive making and later into work such as Phoenix From The Bin, where vulnerability, discarded material and visible process became much more conscious parts of the enquiry. Wilderness Quilt sits earlier in that line. It did not give me a tidy answer about perfection. It gave me evidence that effort, emotion, meaning and an irregular hand were already central to the artist I was becoming.