to: Craft > #05 - Taking a Line for a Walk

Taking a line for a walk

Namita Gupta Wiggers

I unpack my toiletries bag for the first time in more than five years on March 2, 2020. As I walked toward the exit of Concourse D at PDX Airport on the previous day, I focused on the layers of outstretched arms in Samantha Wall’s 10-panel installation, In the Wake, located high above the moving walkways. What feels welcoming about being greeted by my friend’s artwork—an exploration of identity, cultural history, and loss—feels prophetic as I think back on that moment. Within the weeks following that last plane ride on March 1, 2020, Oregon is in lockdown, toilet paper and hand sanitizer are the hottest commodities, our daughter grudgingly moves home to complete her senior year of college, and our son temporarily relocates from Boston to Ithaca to stay with family. Work time and support demands surge while daily living slows to a viscous slog. I need a way to mark and pass time. I need a way to control something because everything is uncertain. I need to ground my now grounded self in physical activity. I need to do something with my hands that I can control.

Passing time through stitching during business travel has been a part of my life for a few years; this happens in airplanes, airports, and hotel rooms and is something I do for myself. These experiments are a personal version of “exquisite corpses” that I stitch with white cotton sashiko thread on denim scraps from jeans discarded by family members. Rather than follow the surrealist game in which multiple people take turns drawing on a piece of paper and folding it to hide all but a few marks before passing it to the next person, I move my embroidery hoop across the fabric and allow myself to only see a bit of the previously embroidered marks, and proceed to stitch from those connection points. I have a few additional guidelines: no more than three lengths of thread in one sitting (to keep me from overworking my hands); no more than three relocations of the bangle-sized hoop in one day (again, to give my hands a break); and the stitching has to be done by passing the needle and thread up through one side and back through to the other side. A slow and deliberate process of making individual stitches, this movement forces me to pay attention to the space between stitches, and to the front and back of the textile because I am choosing where to push the needle from one side to another as I pull the thread through the cloth. The effect I am after is something that may visually evoke kantha or sashiko, but the handling of the tools and materials is different. Those traditions do not use a hoop to tautly stretch the fabric, and the stitcher will often load the needle with fabric using an in/out motion of the needle that enables multiple stitches in one pull of the thread across the top. This works well to create straight lines to attach layers of fabric into a quilt, or to create forms and fill them in with kantha stitches, or to cover a piece of fabric in complex geometric pattern with sashiko. I work more intuitively, and I rely on the physical resistance of the textile as the needle punctures it to start or end a stitch, being able to shift directions because of this slow process; this lets my hands curve the lines with the cloth or a rotation of the hoop.  

There are many projects I think of too late, or simply never do. Hours spent waiting for children while they practiced soccer, baseball, gymnastics, ice skating, bouldering, parkour, and track are gone, and that time sitting on lawns, on bleachers, or in the car could have been marked differently. I could have spent it finishing my son’s quilt; he is now too old for patchwork dogs. I could have written my grandparents’ biography—as I have meant to do for years. Instead, I spent it multitasking by frequently looking up to catch important moments while I worked for the museum on my laptop or phone, not really being present for either work or children and split between body and mind. This pandemic time would be different. In the middle of March 2020, after sewing dozens of fabric face masks, I pulled out one of two long white cotton shirts I’d purchased the previous summer and began stitching the yoke with curves and loops in black cotton Japanese thread.

The pandemic made the constraints of my ordinarily mobile life more visible. Days grew longer with more hours of Zoom meetings and phone calls. Evenings became gatherings of the three of us—my husband, our daughter, and me—to make and share dinner and then watch TV to escape the chaos of the day’s news. My nights are restless and filled with dreams of restaged dinners with friends and family, meals at restaurants with strangers and friends, art openings, or walking through airports. I awaken from them confused by the casualness of unmasked people laughing in groups. Stitching on the shirt gave me a focus and a way to be in the present, to be in my body in a specific place and time. Stitching required nothing of me. But after filling in the yoke, the other parts of the white shirt seem to expand. I lose a sense of how to play with Paul Klee’s idea of “taking a line for a walk”[1] in this project, especially as the world feels like it is closing in more each day. This coincides with my father having a stroke, my mother being at their home alone, and my being unable to go help out for risk of endangering them. I needed help.

Although sewing and needlework have been a part of my life since Montessori preschool (my first sewing kit was a gift at age five), I’ve never completed an embroidery project on this scale. I’ve followed Gabriela Martínez Ortiz (@ofeliayantelmo) on social media for some time, have experimented with her mark-making techniques on my travel embroideries, and was able to enroll in one of her online courses.[2] My travel schedule this past decade has made it difficult to take workshops that were more than a few hours in length, and the pandemic meant that spoon carving (or wheel-throwing) would still not be an option. Martinez’s course offers simple methods for sketching with pen and paper and, more importantly for this project, how to cover surface area while being attentive to the weight, form, and mass of stitched marks. After a few hours of listening, watching, and learning, and a weekend of sketching and testing of stitches on fabric scraps, I have a plan for how to continue to take the line for a walk. I switch from black to blue cotton sashiko thread that nearly matches the ink of my preferred blue-black Waterman fountain pen, a parallel with other mark-making in notebooks and grading of papers in my life. I start with the front of the shirt, and decide to stitch until the pandemic ends or I cover the whole shirt, whichever comes first.

Badima was my first teacher. I still have a skein of the variegated pastel-toned embroidery floss she used to teach me how to make a chain-stitch daisy. But this is not a romantic craft narrative of generational learning and the transference of skill. My grandmother was not a kind teacher, and although she was fluent in many needlework traditions from across India, she kept that knowledge to herself. Instead, I learned as I quietly watched her make things using knitting, crochet, and sewing needles on everything from prepackaged kits to pillowcases, table linens to saris. It is from Badima that I learned to “have something I am working on in my hands.” My sister, who I haven’t seen in more than two years because of COVID and travel, says that she remembers me always making something—pot holders, tiny fabric dolls, Barbie clothes, decoupage Holly Hobbie kits, ribbon bow ties, and beaded jewelry. What I gleaned from Badima, years of playing with materials, and the people I’ve met through curating, documenting, and studying craft for decades guides the practical and poetic parts of this project.[3]

I remember Darrel Morris recounting how he worked from left to right across the fabric when stitching the first of his large works.[4] This caused the fabric to shrink as the tension from the thread pulled the right side to meet the left. I move from left to right, and right to left, up and down, and across the placket to distribute tension. Drawing on Martinez’s lessons about compositional density, and knowing that I may wear this shirt some day, I move to stitching the back after the embroidered front area creates a form-flattering V across my chest and midsection. I move down the spine, spreading out to both the right and the left to maintain even tension.

I “love” my thread as taught by Natalie Chanin.[5] After threading the needle, I pinch my forefinger and thumb around the thread, gliding them down together to the ends a few times before making a knot. This, Chanin teaches, is a moment to think about those you love, the person to whom you may be gifting this project, and those who taught you to work with your hands. On a practical level, this step untwists thread and is a preparatory step much like waxing a saw blade when preparing to cut into a piece of metal. For the past year, each time I’ve “loved” my thread as I begin a new line of stitching has been a meditation on people in my life: I love and miss you very much. I miss everyone. I miss meals with you, laughing with you, being around you. I miss you. I miss you. And I miss you.  

Thread has energy, I learned from Yoshiko Wada, and the energy of the day inevitably makes its way into the project.[6] I stitch a few nights each week. The weeks turn into months, and months into a year and beyond. My energy shifts from a personal project to pass time and stitching to relax to racing toward something that I cannot name. The weight of the year feels manifest in the stitches and spaces, and, through my hands, I go from worrying about our family’s safety from COVID to worrying about the safety of protestors as helicopters circle above Portland through the summer; keeping the program experience as stable and consistent as possible while shifting everything online once, twice, and thrice; the failures of the government and health care; wildfires and ice storms; more than 500,000 people dead from COVID in the US alone; the election; random and deliberate violence; walking grooves in the floor to build up my knee from 5,000 to 6,000 to 7,000 daily steps; my fear of random violence while walking outside colliding with the need to drive to Seattle to help my parents during my father’s second surgery of 2020. I work to think about how poet Ross Gay finds delights every day,[7] and try to think about other moments: teaching the kids to cook Indian food over Zoom; online celebrations of birthdays and graduations and weddings with family across the globe; connecting with friends by phone and socially distant visits on the porch with massive electric heaters and in the backyard with a fire pit. My stitching changes. The loops and curves open up. I feel myself anxiously moving the hoop to cover the expanse of the fabric rather than fill in space within the hoop as I’d done in the beginning. Maybe I can move the world into a different state of being by beating the pandemic through stitching to the edges of the shirt’s hem.

There is a single line of black thread in the middle of the back of the shirt. It was an accident. It happened at the end of the January/Spring Residency for the MA in Critical Craft Studies, on an evening when we’d gathered socially via Zoom after trying to learn and to teach through an insurrection, inauguration, and impeachment. I realized partway through stitching that I’d made a mistake, and decided to leave it. It marks a transition.

Eight days later, the Governor of Oregon decides to vaccinate teachers first, and our daughter receives her first vaccination on January 28, 2021. To celebrate, I add a gold Band-Aid to the left arm of the shirt, stitching the date of her first, then her second vaccine, finishing with her name and French knots to punctuate the center of the design.[8] The metallic thread is rigid and hard to work with, and often requires the use of a laying tool to guide the thread through the shirt or make stitches lie evenly. The change is a relief. Any change is a relief. I move back to the blue thread as we wait for more people to get vaccinated; the curves and loops become looser, messier, twisted because I am mixing individual stitches with loaded needles in my impatience to get our parents vaccinated.

February brings two more people to the sleeves, and I begin to connect the back to the two front panels; the blue lines hug my midsection when I try on the shirt. Every day is excruciating. I have no patience, and I grow difficult to speak with as tracking vaccinations consumes me. The blue stitched lines are no longer walking. They are running. In March, I add or complete Band-Aids for 17 family members across the US (Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, Texas, and Washington), including one person who contracted and recovered from COVID that month. My hands relish the shift between the two types of threads and the ache of daily stitching, sometimes for hours to keep up. My heart grows hopeful at the possibility of seeing and hugging family. I stop stitching blue lines upon receiving my second vaccination on April 14, 2021, and quietly cry while finishing the French knots on the Band-Aids on the collar that mark vaccines for Scott and me. Two more family members’ vaccination Band-Aids are added in April, with their second vaccines scheduled in May; 20 immediate family members in total vaccinated. The pandemic is far from over. This pandemic project, however, is done.

I cannot separate the situation of the pandemic from the range of types of events of the past year, and am challenged by what the stitched shirt does and does not convey. This project as an artifact of the past year is visibly evident in the Band-Aids, and less so in the lines I took for a walk while we waited and watched and waited and watched. The collection of Band-Aids is evidence of how lucky our family is to be able to stay at home and to be safe when so many cannot. It leaves me feeling heavy and light all at once. I feel grief in the punctures, stitches, spaces, and lines, and a heaviness connected to loss, the daily challenge of living, loving, being, hoping for many kinds of change. I feel light with the possibilities of seeing family; in one week, we will see our son for the first time in more than a year.

This shirt has hung on the door to our family room for more than a year. I have sat on the couch with my glasses off and head down to stitch for a few nights every week since March 2020. It feels strange not to see the shirt on the door—a relief and absence all at once. Sharing my work-in-progress led to encouragement from and connection with many, and to the invitation to share the project for the next year in the exhibition Community Spread: How We Faced a Pandemic, at the Wing Luke Museum of Asian American Experience, Seattle, Washington.[9] I have sat on the couch with my glasses off and head down to stitch for a few nights every week since March 2020, and now, in April 2021, It feels strange not to see the shirt on the door—relief and absence all at once—and my hands are ready to move on to a different project.

I used to carry Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams in my travel bag. Lightman composes a series of stories in which time behaves differently, as if imagined by Albert Einstein as he developed his theories about physics and relativity. In one story, time is circular, in another geological, and in a third, time stands still. The book captures some of the disjuncture of my life—starting in one place and time and ending in another from the same seat in an airplane—and the contrast between the forced stillness of the present with the twice-a-month air travel of the past several years.

No time or place is the same in the world right now. As I conclude this essay, my ancestral home, India, is burning with funeral pyres as COVID deaths reach into six-digit figures. In my home and birthplace, the United States, my husband and I are packing to fly from Portland, Oregon, to Boston, Massachusetts, to see our son. No time or place is the same in the world right now. My stitching on this shirt maps my own waiting at home base, and my own safe transition into circulation. Tracking time through making, for me, will take a different form in the next stage of this global pandemic. It’s time for a new project.  

Thank you, Anjali Gupta, Ben Lignel, Jessie Shires, and Scott Wiggers, for your help with drafts of this essay.

[1] This is a variation of Paul Klee’s discussion about drawing. See https://www.paulklee.net/paul-klee-quotes.jsp for examples of quotes. Retrieved March 28, 2021.

[2]  I enrolled in Gabriela Martínez Ortiz’s “Designing Handicraft Garments from Scratch” on Domestika. Taught in Spanish with subtitles, the four-part course offers excellent guidance for beginning and experienced needlework in a series of shorter video recordings, along with a space for sharing work, all at a low cost. It was the ideal course—I could zip through the videos to the parts I needed to think through my project, return if needed, and consume only what I wanted. In fact, I’ve never completed section four, and am not sure if I ever will. Other workshops I took during COVID—all with a brief two-hour format—included a mending workshop with Amy Meissner, dressmaking with @criswoodsews, and a writing workshop with Alexander Chee. 

[3] Thank you, Anjali Gupta, for reminding me that I have been making things for as long as you remember. Conversation with author, May 2, 2021.

[4] See Darrel Morris: The Large Works 1999–2008, curated by Namita Gupta Wiggers, Museum of Contemporary Craft in partnership with Pacific Northwest College of Art, January 22–May 30, 2009, http://mocc.pnca.edu/exhibitions/1472 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiVoKzHSWf0. Retrieved April 4, 2021.

[5] I was fortunate to be able to participate in a workshop as research for a potential exhibition project with Natalie Chanin, of Alabama Chanin, in April 2010, co-sponsored by Pacific Northwest College of Art in partnership with Museum of Contemporary Craft.

[6] As the juror for the Made/Aware exhibition in conjunction with the Surface Design Association’s 2015 Conference at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, I was given the opportunity to enroll in Yoshiko Wada’s course “Knowing the Material: Getting the Most Out of the Least,” https://shibori.org/2015/10/20/knowing-the-material-getting-the-most-out-of-the-least-a-madeaware-workshop-at-arrowmont-scool-of-arts-and-craft/. Retrieved April 22, 2021.

[7] See Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays, New York, NY: Algonquin Books, 2019. Thank you, Sonya Clark, for introducing me to this book. 

[8] Working with metallic thread is new for me. In November 2020, I used the thread to stitch a contribution to the artist-guided community artwork created by Marie Watt and Cannupa Hanska Luger for Each/Other, Denver Art Museum, May 23–August 22, 2021.

[9] This piece of embroidery, which I titled Taking a Line for a Walk, will be on view in Community Spread: How We Faced a Pandemic, New Dialogues Initiative Gallery, Wing Luke Museum of Asian American Experience, Seattle, Washington, May 7, 2021–February 19, 2022. Retrieved May 1, 2021, https://www.wingluke.org/single-exhibit/?mep_event=4929&t=c.