Imagine sitting at the dining room table, staring at a vase of fresh-cut flowers. They are cut fresh every day—you aren’t sure how long this will last, so these flowers have to last forever, eternally blooming, eternally new, so flippantly alive. Underneath the pearls, a lump forms in your throat. There are marbles in your stomach. There are clusters of white light in your head, loud and aching. Every day you repeat this motion, back and forth, over and under, disappearing dust and making clean from chaos, lighting candles and fluffing pillows. Perfection is a simple request, isn’t it? Easy. One wrong move, one skipped stitch, one snag, and the candles burn themselves into a puddle, the dirt on the countertops is deafening, the crooked hem of your dress could kill. Perfection is easy for a few weeks, a few months, a few years. Forever? Easy. All you have to do is keep the flowers blooming, keep the pearls on your neck, keep the smile on your lips. The marbles in your stomach keep rolling around, the light in your head is blinding. Easy.

 

The goal of “women’s work” has long been perfection: weaving a consistent and flawless linen, crocheting a symmetrical doily or mastering the art of the French knot leave no room for error or imperfection. One skipped stitch, one snag, and the craft is compromised, the maker must try again. For many years, my grandmother’s married life was like this: perfection was the minimum requirement, the norm. Knowing my grandfather, diagnosed with Hodgin’s disease, could die at any moment, what could she do but make his life as beautiful as possible? With fresh-cut flowers in every room and candle-lit dinners every night, it is easy to become accustomed to perfection, to become bored of it. That is, until one skipped stitch, one snag, one dot of something new appears.

 

My piece adopts weaving, a common process in “women’s work,” to recreate my grandmother’s experience: knowing her husband’s prognosis and being unable to tell him, being the perfect wife under the gray cloud of his impending death. I weaved the piece using uniform thread and pattern, striving for perfection, forcing any chance error I make to be easily spotted. The red spots on the fabric’s surface also rely on chance: by dropping red dye randomly on a completed section, then reweaving it to fragment the pattern, I aim to communicate a disconnect between intention and outcome, perfection and reality.

 

The tapestry is littered with these marks, little instances of imperfection, not ideal but negligible. Upon closer inspection, however, larger flaws begin to appear: bumps, lumps, snags and cinching caused by hand-embroidered running stitch and French knots of all sizes. A visceral element, these textures mimic both the disease my grandfather suffered, and the ulcers my grandmother developed during this stressful period of her life.

 

My grandmother’s own words, floating above the stitches and hiding amongst the knots, give the piece a voice. The clusters of texture surrounding the phrase “carrying all of this” not only provide contrast and visual interest, but also visually characterize the burden she carried, the accumulation of worry and heartbreak and hurt over decades of mandatory perfection. Fragments of quotes combine to describe the space in which she existed: not quite living, not yet dead.

                                   

In this piece, I am able to provide a visual representation of my grandfather’s disease and my grandmother’s experience using the artistic vernacular of “women’s work” as process, medium, and narrative element.