Rachel
Pearcey

For some years now my work has been about stitching and marks – small, often tiny, stitches/marks.   Stitched ‘marks’ take on a stuttering quality which becomes more apparent the closer one looks; I love this very obvious sense of the 'handmade' in the involuntary unevenness of each stitch and the intimacy of close inspection which each stitched work invites.

At 'lockdown' I started to make textile vessels (bowls, cups, bottles, jars, flasks, jugs) - I used felted wool blankets to create the shapes, then covered these with vintage linen - recycling what fabric I had to hand. These textile vessels seem to me a  metaphor for these dreadful times, they are without colour, they sit silently, they do not clink or crash or break nor are they perfect and they have no use; they sit, slightly misshapen, quietly, waiting.