‘Threads of Lethe’.

Memories are what make us who we are.   Without the we cannot be ourselves.  They shape our characters and our actions.  All that we do and all that we are comes from our own experiences and the recollection of them. Losing my memory is a terrifying thought.    

I know several elderly people living with dementia.  Their thoughts are fragmented, immediate and/ or recent memory is lost but their memories of long-ago events or their childhood is clearer.  

Memory has many connections to textiles – we talk about ‘threads of thought’, and garments and other textiles remind us of people or events.  So, I decided to create an upholstered chair as a memorial to memory. I opted to use old, partially completed tapestries - their pixelated images are reminiscent of broken screen images.  I purchased all the materials for this piece from the Big C cancer charity, in support of their work and to use found objects which have their own history. I chose to present the work as a chair to reflect the sedentary nature of stitching – in memory of the original stitchers and as a domestic object.

I completed the tapestries by filling in colour blocks, my stitching rejects the imagery of the printed canvas – abstracting the colours to blanks of solid colour, deliberately confusing the images. The images are furthered distorted and blurred through the upholstering with some canvases reversed  - to communicate confusion, a tangling of thought.​

I have titled the completed chair ‘Threads of Lethe’. In classical Greek, the word lethe literally means "oblivion", "forgetfulness", or "concealment".