Final Piece

For the final exhibition and our main piece of the year, we were encouraged to bring something from the main part of our degree into the work. For me, the next stage was costume. But I wasn’t quite ready to leave behind everything I had been experimenting with in Fine Art, so I wanted to carry some of that with me.

So I compromised and used fabric.

I had recently been to St Ives for a weekend with friends. I tend to suffer with SAD during the winter and I have found that walking by the sea, listening to the waves and just letting my cares wash away for a while helps me more than I can explain.

I call it my “winter frozen soul”.

It is that time of year when I want to run away from everything and everyone. I put a smile on my face, pretend everything is fine and carry on, while underneath I really just want to escape and hide somewhere as far away and as remote as possible.

But the sea seems to ground me. Something about standing beside it and watching it constantly move seems to thaw that frozen feeling, even if only for a little while. It gives me something to hold onto until spring arrives and the world starts to renew itself with birdsong and flowers.

That feeling became the starting point for my final piece.

The actual making of it was incredibly time-consuming. I spent so many hours sitting at a sewing machine, making tiny “squiggles” that became small parts of an ever-changing piece. I’m fairly sure the constant sound of the sewing machine at high speed drove the other students completely mad.

I didn’t really mind. I had an image in my head and I just kept sewing until I could somehow make it appear in front of me.

The piece went through many different versions before I was finally happy with it. I kept changing things, moving things around and adding more until it started to feel right.

I wanted it to have the movement of the sea and the wind, the way nothing stays still for very long. The colours changed, the shapes moved and the fabric flowed. I wasn’t trying to make a realistic picture of the sea. I was trying to capture how the sea makes me feel.

In the end, I think that was what mattered most to me. I had started the year wanting to create costume, but in the process I learned to love fine art. Somehow, using fabric allowed me to bring the two together. It was still costume at heart, but it was also a little piece of my winter frozen soul, and perhaps a reminder that I could get through it and eventually find my way back to spring.