bridget martin

Within the first few stitches a tangle has formed. I knew the thread was too long and inevitably would develop a knot but carried on regardless. I look at the tangle in all its glorious mess and leave it where it is, continue with my stitching and tie the loose thread. In the imperfection lies the perfection. A metaphor for life. I love the phrase ‘loose threads’ with its hint of chaos, its refusal to be finished, to be secure, to be neat and tidied away. Loose threads are wayward, they unravel, become tangled, they have a mind of their own, they are feral, they are free. Loose threads suggest endless possibility, an offering of something more, a becoming.

In The Marriage Portrait, Maggie O’Farrell writes ‘she [Lucrezia] has always had a secret liking for the part of the embroidery, the ‘wrong’ side, congested with knots, striations of silk and twists of thread. How much more interesting it is, with its frank display of the labour needed to attain the perfection of the finished piece’. It seems to me that we all inhabit the ‘wrong’ side of the embroidery, all of us messy, imperfect and unfinished, and it is the ‘wrong’ side that not only reveals our authenticity but also the beauty to be found in the unexpected. Similarly the loose threads and mistakes of tangles and knots that develop on my pages are more interesting to me than something more ordered and planned. They suggest movement and energy and life.

More and more I’m choosing to stitch together elements of collage rather than gluing them, preferring the softness and impermanence of thread over the rigid nature of glue. Gathering torn papers and fraying fabric together with stitches and knots is quiet and slow, allowing more time for emotions to surface. Moments are held for a while before being released. At the same time the humility of the materials I choose make them beautiful to me, their ordinariness is extraordinary, the torn and frayed revealing a fragile strength. Stitching these elements together seems to honour them in a way that gluing doesn’t, each slow and subtle stitch bringing something new into existence.

I liken these layers in my books to the moments of our lives, the often quiet and slow and seemingly insignificant moments that accumulate to become something magical. They are moments that gradually take up space, they are whispers that ask to be heard. They are the moments that form our lives. We are all just loose threads really, beautifully flawed and unfinished, somewhere in the circle of our story. But the real wonder is that  loose threads can come together, they can entwine and connect, they can weave new stories and therein lies the hope. I don’t want to be stuck down, static and unyielding, unable to loop back and try again. I want to be a loose thread, ready to fly where the wind takes me, reaching out, ready to hold and be held, forever hopeful.