Mending Mother is a series of fabric works that grew out of an earlier work titled Mending God The Mother (2024), in which I added a series of mending stitches to a disfigured portrait of the Madonna and Child. In this new body of work I consider more closely the process of mending as a reparative act of care.
Similarly to kneading dough, there is an element of presence and slow labour to the work of embroidering and mending that becomes for me another way of attuning to aesthesis. These stitched works are attempts towards a reparative act, which I do not think of as one that can ‘fix’ what was previously broken, cast aside, or othered. Rather I think of ‘repair’ as an act of mending, one that evidences the mending done, and in so doing, holds what was and builds on it something new, or, more appropriately, something alternative.
camilla pontiggia 