transcript

“Every Stitch a Syllable: Labour and Listening in Visual Art and Narrative Medicine” 

One stitch, two stitch, three stitch, four… 

The needle punctures, the thread pulls taut, another tiny loop makes a secure hold. Over and over, this rhythm repeats — repeats from the same fingers and hands; repeats across days and weeks; repeats from the past where so many hands pulled so many threads; repeats in time to come when the stitches wear or snap and are taken up again to be mended. 

Our stories mirror this rhythm. One word, two words, three words, four… 

Until there are dozens and hundreds stitched together — becoming a phrase, an event, a pause, a silence. Instead of cloth, we rely on ears and eyes to hear our voice or read our words. The thread of our words is stitched to the substrate of another’s attention. This process also repeats — words are spun together from the voice or hand; they are repeated for many ears or eyes; they weave in echoes of the past; they are told over and over again when the story must be mended. [/] 

What joins these ways of making and telling is the slow, accumulative labour of their creation. One stitch, one syllable at a time, a cloth or a story finds a form, and gathers up the time and labour for its making. Something whole gradually takes shape from every small stitch and every chosen word. 

These acts of labour and listening are both indivisible from time or duration. Stitching a cloth or telling a story requires time and labour from the teller or maker, and the gift of time and attention from the receiver or listener. This kind of duration and its attendant labour can be a powerful force for care and transformation. When two people invest their time and commit their attentive presence to one another, this becomes an ethical act. In healthcare and many other contexts, this committed attention is often invested without knowing what the outcome of the interaction will be. Rita Charon describes reading in a similar way when saying that “[r]eading becomes recognized as an ethical act joining reader and writer in transformative engagement leading to singular consequences for each reader instead of an orderly plotting toward an inevitable shared conclusion” (Charon et al., p.3). Similarly, when hearer and teller commit to a shared time without expectation, the space around them can become expansive. This particular kind of letting go, an experience that opens a door to a transformative kind of care for both listener and storyteller can be thought of in terms of how the French philosopher Simone Weil describes attention. For Weil, “attention is not focused, tense concentration. It has nothing to do with willpower. Attention is attente, a waiting, a letting go, an unselfish opening” (Moi, London Review of Books). An encounter between hearer and teller where each is fully attentive to the story unfolding between them holds the possibility of an encounter of care which is transformative for both. 

As an artist, a maker, I am preoccupied by these ideas of labour, duration, and the possibility of transformative care by listening and attention. I am preoccupied by the translation that happens between these ideas and a material form; how the actual process of making can bring forth these concepts in a visible, tactile way. These ideas of labour and listening are central to my work as an artist and underpin every stage of my creative process. I make work that you can be inside of — houses, sails, textiles — the way you can be inside a story or a poem. A story or a house each offer a kind of shelter, either in space or in time. In working between these two kinds of shelter, I use reading and writing, labour and listening, as a substrate for making sculpture and installation. Words provide the raw material which alchemizes into something visible, tactile, and able to be experienced with our whole bodies. 

This translation between story and material in my art practice hinges on the same foundational concepts as narrative medicine: attention, representation, and affiliation. In this context, attention is that state of heightened awareness and commitment that a listener can donate to a teller. Rare, demanding, and rewarding, attention uses the listening self as a vessel to capture and reveal that which a teller has to tell. Representation confers visual or written form on the story heard or perceived, thereby making it newly visible to both the listener and the teller. Affiliation, which results from deep attentive listening and the knowledge achieved through representation, binds […] self and other into relationships that support recognition and action as one stays the course with the other through whatever is to be faced (Charon et al). 

These three threads run through all of my recent work. In making a sculpture or installation, my aim is often to create a condition rather than something to look at. In making houses, sails, textiles — something a person can climb inside of — I want to open a space where curiosity, care, and attention can occur. I want to create a condition where stories can rise to the surface and a transformative kind of listening is possible.         

[nostos]

I spent a summer building these three houses out of pine and carefully attaching the delicate paper of sewing patterns together to form their walls. Together, they are called nostos: a home against the skin. ‘Nostos’ means to return home; a homecoming, or homeward journey; especially alluding to the myth of Odysseus. This nostos, these houses, also consider textiles as the first house of the body and what either can offer us in terms of protection. Embedded in these houses are also the stories of labour — the traditionally female labour of sewing and stitching, of keeping loved ones warm, every stitch a syllable. The houses also index the traditional male labour of house-building — using hammers instead of needles, nails instead of thread. Each a way of telling, of taking care, of keeping warm, of paying attention. 

[clew]

This next trio of houses in the woods is called clew. A clew can be many things — the lower corner of a sail or the action of either furling or unfurling this same sail. It can also signify the act of rolling something into a ball, or a ball of thread itself, particularly in reference to the Greek myth of Ariadne, Theseus, and the labyrinth.

These houses in the woods are bound to one another by a single length of red thread that winds its way through each of them, and is anchored to the mast — a living tree — fitted with a white sail. The mythical story and the simpler story underneath about finding your way home, is made material in this instance. The red thread provides bearings back home to the houses even while the white sail is beckoning toward the water. 

These houses also require the gift of duration from the visitor, or if you like, the listener. It requires time to make your way among the houses, being careful of the red thread while attempting to follow it, keeping one eye on the sail, blowing in the breeze. It requires time to let the story surface.

[a labour of stitches] 

This pair of sails is called a labour of stitches. I chose to use ‘a labour’ as a collective noun for a vast number of stitches. Stitches that are so vast as to be uncountable in connection with the labours of the uncountable, mostly female, hands which made them over generations. If every stitch is a syllable, I’d like to give voice to those phrases made by quiet labour. 

These sails connect the traditionally public masculinized labour of work at sea and the historically private feminized labour of sewing and domestic making. Two 15-foot sails hang back to back from a tree, one white sail quilted in red thread, the other sail red stitched in white. The sails make an enclosure between them where someone can stand inside and feel the wind billowing around them. This sensation recalls both the sense of being at sea on a sailboat and that of being inside sheets and quilts at night.

The long red diagonals that dart up the white sail are tacking stitches. This step, this stitch is the most private and transient kind. Tacks are only meant to hold the quilt layers together while the more refined, permanent stitching happens over and around them. Only the quilt maker sees these kind of stitches — it is a private stitch for an often private, bed-bound object. Yet tacking is also the action of changing course on a sailboat by turning a boat’s head into and through the wind. The word ‘tack’ derives from the Old French tache meaning ‘to clasp.’ To clasp a sail heading home, to clasp layers of cloth together, hands clasping a quilt for warmth at night. This action of tacking, of clasping, is a way to draw these two kinds of labour closer together.

a labour of stitches uses the common material of cloth to join the ideas of travel by water and dream-travel by night, and to equate the value of these two uses and their labours.

[tenderhouse]

This next house is called tenderhouse, which is a house of words. On this small structure, nearly 200 fabric knots spell out an excerpt in Braille from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: “the houses have all gone under the sea / the dancers have all gone under the hill.” 

Two meanings of the word “tender” are: 1) sensitive to touch or palpation and 2) an offer or proposal made for acceptance. A visitor in this house can run their hands over the fabric knots, being sensitive to touch and palpation, and let reading become an embodied, multi-sensory act. The scale of the Braille is here expanded from the width of a fingertip to the width of a splayed hand, necessitating a slow process of reading, letter by letter, syllable by syllable. All the cloth is second-hand and domestic — sheets, pillowcases, curtains, cheesecloth, aprons. The fabric of bedrooms and kitchens. The fabric of repetition, of folding, of wringing, of tying, of being close to the skin. Traditionally, the fabric of female bodies. Each piece of cloth preserves a gesture of touch within it, which I continued while tying repetitive knots throughout the house. This gesture continues further through touch from the splayed hands of visitors. The tails of these knots wave in the wind outside, an instance of language made tactile, animate. This house creates a small 6 x 6’ footprint of space. In a narrative medicine context, the house’s small space creates a place where listening and witness can emerge. [/] 

Creating a condition where people can sit in sheltered proximity can catalyze an encounter of care, where a teller and a listener can devote their full attention to one another. To circle back to Simone Weil, she writes that “…[T]hose who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention. The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle.” (Weil, Waiting on God, 36). Weil’s kind of attention, her attente, is a demanding act, but it is a capacity that improves the more we bring our full attention to bear on one another. Part of my motivation in making these kinds of invitational spaces is to create opportunities where a deeper listening and attention can emerge — listening and attending to another, or our own imagination, or the world around us.    

This form of deep embodied listening, of complete attendance, can also manifest in material form. Handling a material, turning something over in your hands, can give you an insight into what its capacities are, how it is willing to be transformed, what stories it holds of its own making. This kind of listening can be woven through every layer of a physical work — an attendance to the raw material; an attendance to the process of stitching, nailing, suturing materials together; an attendance to what sort of condition or atmosphere this work will create when it is out of your hands. If the listening is embedded in every layer, then the structure will resonate with the attention of its making, and in turn, allow that feeling to permeate others who experience it.

The labour and repetition intrinsic to the building and sewing process is mirrored in the labour and repetition of showing up to listen for one another. Drawing on the philosopher Emmual Levinas, Arthur Frank writes that “[o]ne of our most difficult duties as human beings is to listen to the voices of those who suffer […] These voices bespeak conditions of embodiment that most of us would rather forget our own vulnerability to. Listening is hard but it is also a fundamental moral act […]; we require an ethics of listening. In listening for the other we also listen for ourselves. The moment of witness in the story crystallizes a mutuality of need, where each is for the other. (Frank, Body, Illness & Ethics, 25) From this standpoint of each of us being for the Other, we are brought into being by relationship and attention. 

This experience is perhaps nowhere more present than in a healthcare setting. Each patient faces the potentially uncertain and frightening physical effects of illness, and the fracturing of one’s narrative identity. Paul Ricoeur’s concept of narrative identity tells us that a self is “born in stories” (Frank, Body, Illness & Ethics, p. 62) In The Wounded Storyteller, Arthur Frank speaks of “narrative wreckage” and how someone facing an illness can feel shipwrecked in an eternal present — their narrative identity unable to flow from their past experience, yet unable to imagine or contemplate a future with an unexpected or serious illness. The “central [storytelling] resource” of temporality is lost. The way out of narrative wreckage is through telling stories to encompass the new reality. Through telling, “the self is being formed in what is told.” This mutuality of witness becomes the rich ground where affiliation can grow. Paraphrasing the psychoanalyst Roy Schafer, Frank says that “the self-story is told both to others and to one’s self; each telling is enfolded within the other. This way of telling is therefore a dual affirmation — relationships with others are reaffirmed, and the self is reaffirmed also” (p.56).

Aside from my work as an artist, I’ve also worked for many years as a book editor and a registered massage therapist. There are surprising parallels between each. I came to manual therapy work after being in publishing and editing, and as I learned the litanies of orthopaedic tests, human anatomy, and clinical treatment, I began to notice something else. I had particular interests in people’s experience of pain, concussions, and chronic illnesses, and because I often had an hour with a person, they told me their stories which grew far more expansive than an intake interview. My literary and editorial side noticed how and when a person began to tell their story, what kind of tone their voice took on, where they slipped into different tenses, the emotional tenor of certain recalled events. The oft-used phrase “this is probably not important, but…” always sharpened my attention. It was a phrase that usually preceded a detail someone was hesitant to tell, or something they worried about but doubted its significance, or an experience that had been dismissed in the past — all of which said “this is important to me, but I am afraid it won’t be important to you”. I came to see that part of what I was doing was helping people mend their stories. In cases where there was an acute sense of before and after — a concussion that had strong emotional and cognitive symptoms perhaps — people were left unmoored, the narrative of their own identity fractured, and unsure of how their story continued from this new place. In chronic conditions, the grief of not being able to hope for a “cure” often surfaced, and the narrative became about how to live alongside this new part of their identity. Eric Cassell defines healing as the "restoration of wholeness in a patient whose identity and social life has been fragmented.” (Carson and Cole, Medical Humanities, p.239) A move towards this restoration of wholeness seemed to grow when a person’s story was being witnessed with my full attention — the work of their telling mirrored in the work of my listening. This act of witness and mutuality was also an act of repair, helping to mend the damage to a person’s sense of narrative wreckage. 

My commitment to this kind of listening is also sharpened through my experience of being on the other side of this dyad, the patient who is telling. As someone with an autoimmune condition, I’ve told and retold some version of my own illness story countless times in the long process of receiving a diagnosis. Depending on who I was telling the story to, I could see myself shifting the shape of it, emphasizing certain details, downplaying others. Each time I told it, however, what I wanted aside from some kind of reliable treatment option, was to be recognized, for my experience to be validated, taken seriously, and attended to. The search for a diagnosis was also a search for a name — I wanted to have something to hang all my disparate symptoms under, for them to have some kind of narrative cohesion. I was searching for both that act of witness and a narrative repair.

If we go back to Simone Weil’s idea of attention, attente, “a waiting, a letting go, an opening,” and unite it with Paul Ricoeur’s “a self born in stories,” we can see the vast potential for a transformative kind of care to occur. Both listener and teller must undergo in some form of opening, of letting go while the story unfolds, its telling absorbed by both the hearer and the teller. If this space between them is held securely and expansively, nothing less than a new self can be born in that story. 

As an artist, I’ve become committed to making spaces and conditions that foster this kind of opening, the potential for listening, and the potential for transformative care. A house, a sail, a textile can make a small, proximate space where listener and teller can meet, even if both those aspects are contained in the same person. Labour and listening are the threads that are woven throughout myself as an artist, a maker, a reader, a listener, a patient, a witness to others. The labour of listening, when it is deep and fully attentive is perhaps one of the most complex labours we undertake for ourselves and others in this life. But stitch by stitch, word by word, each act of listening can be an act that is committed to witness and repair. The self born in stories can be born again and again, the threads of our narrative identity mended by the generosity of another’s deep and full attention.