counting stitches

4k video • 17:08 min • 2023

Struts Gallery — No Ceiling: It’s About Time, 2023

Counting Stitches is a looped video project that explores marking time through the material of domestic fibrework, using an extreme close-up view on the floral embroidery of a found handkerchief. I wanted to know how many stitches, and thus approximately how much time, another person had spent in making these embroidered patterns. The only way I was able to distinguish each stitch was through viewing them through a macro lens, and the only way I could keep track of the numbers as I went was to count out loud. The resulting video is a real-time inventory of another’s time through the duration of my own time, my voice naming increasing numbers and a sewing needle visually marking progress through the stitches.

Since this kind of domestic labour was usually done in living rooms (or the more public spaces of a private house), I placed myself in a similar site, and set up additional microphones around the house to capture the interruptions and ambient noise of the general ongoingness of other people’s time: the hum of passing traffic; footsteps on creaking stairs; someone practicing piano in the distance; softly muted voices; the shift of natural light.

Taken together, this video work witnesses and spends time with an unknown person’s time — in a way, keeping company across time. In an embodied way, I sit in a similar position as they would have; mirror their squint over the tiny stitches; lose track, pause, and start again; and allow the sounds of other movements and times to be captured along with it.

This project was made possible through generous assistance from ArtsNB and the Canada Council for the Arts.