mending, made visible

Lately, I’ve been circling around repair, in both my work and my art.

I often call myself a maker and a mender — the practice of making with cloth and humans and systems, the practice of mending ripped textiles and relationships and power structures.

I started sewing in earnest when I was sick for nearly a year, mending everything I could get my hands on. I even stitched up the polyester IKEA laundry hamper. These days, I’m working on a pair of quilts that speak of anger, grief, misogyny, tenderness, aliveness, a love that is expansive — and, with each stitch, repair.

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“Mending is primarily associated with clothing or articles of personal use, and then extended to relationships.”

When you mend clothing, you snip away the jagged edges around the hole, expose the weak spots before you stitch in a patch. Sometimes you put in a temporary basting stitch, scaffolding for the sturdier stitches to come. Traditionally, mending is praised when it’s invisible, when you can’t tell there was once a tear, but for impeccably tiny stitches around the edges. 

How often we are praised for making ourselves invisible.

But what if the new stitches become embroidery on the cloth? What happens when invisible labor is made visible?

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“I see mending as a creative gesture that confronts fragility, vulnerability, and impermanence, is reminiscent of the particularities of context, embodies hope and continuity in spite of rifts, and foregrounds the feminine and the intimate.”

In my work these days, I’ve been turning towards conflict mediation, designing the facilitation I wish I could have had, teaching relational skills for intimacy and vulnerability, building a container for restoration, repair, resolution.  

Conflict holds many different experiences. There is the emotional, the somatic, the logical, the material, and the hierarchical.

In my practice, we name them all.

We snip away the jagged edges; we expose the weak spots. We identify the power hierarchies that shape unequal consequences. We understand the depth of the harm done.

We do all of this, and then we build the scaffolding to mend.

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“By pulling a thread from this literal form of domestic repair to suture frays in the public domain, I attempt to rethink societal wounds, darns, and scars as liminal spaces that can transpose us into futures without erasing the past.

The work of mending requires many stitches, both visible and invisible. The work of relational repair requires the same.

And this is where work becomes art — where the embroidery can be rich with characters, symbols, texture, color. The relational fabric, too — a story among people retold, reformed, reshaped, restored — the breathtaking vulnerability of hope, tenderness, intimacy.

How beautiful the mending.