What We Learned From a Year of Crafting

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Steven Kurutz, May 13, 2021

Link: What We Learned from a Year of Crafting

. . . “To make something is such a powerful experience for someone. It is a meditation,” Ms. Carey added. “And then the internet gives you an opportunity to share it.”

That’s what Namita Gupta Wiggers has done on Instagram with the shirt she spent a year stitching. In March of last year, Mrs. Wiggers, a curator and writer and the founding director of the Master of Arts program at Warren Wilson College, outside Asheville, N.C., pulled out a simple white shirt and, following the advice of the artist Paul Klee, began taking a line for a walk.

She used a basic running stitch, in blue, and worked on the shirt as a way to process her emotions, observing no pattern. “In and out, up and down,” Mrs. Wiggers said. “There was something extremely grounding to sit down and work through something right in front of me.”

Months turned into a year. She decided she would stitch until she filled the shirt or the pandemic ended. Then, in January, her daughter, a schoolteacher, got her first vaccine shot, and Mrs. Wiggers had the idea to sew a Band-Aid in gold thread, with her daughter’s name and date of vaccination. As more of her family members were vaccinated, Mrs. Wiggers sewed Band-Aids for them, too, down the sleeves, on the collar, 20 in all.

Stitching the last one was “an incredible sense of relief,” Mrs. Wiggers said. “Closure isn’t the right word, but there is a sense of different possibilities. Things may get to the point where we may see each other soon.” (Already a pandemic artifact, the shirt will be on view at the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience through May 2022.)

COMMUNITY SPREAD: HOW WE FACED A PANDEMIC

THE WING LUKE MUSEUM OF ASIAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE

On view May 7, 2021 through May 2022

Link: The Wing Luke Museum of Asian American Experience

The embroidered shirt, “Taking a Line for a Walk,” is on view in this exhibition at The Wing Luke from March 2020 - April 2021

Exhibition Label:

Purchased white cotton shirt, black and blue cotton embroidery thread, gold-colored metallic embroidery thread

There are many projects I think of too late, or simply never do. For example, I spent hours “multitasking” by working on a laptop while my children practiced sports. I was not present for either my children or work at these times. This project is different. It is a way to mark and pass time and to control something when everything feels out of control.

I’d planned to stitch until I covered the shirt or the pandemic ended, whichever came first. I started stitching in March 2020, and as the weeks turned into months, and the months stretched past a year. The stitching intentionally echoes kantha and sashiko embroidery. Rather than use stitches to fill in a shape or a pattern, I let the lines unfold, combining artist Paul Klee’s ideas of “taking a line for a walk” with a Surrealist game called “exquisite corpse.” The fluidity of the inky-blue cotton thread maps the waiting at home stage, a sharp contrast with the stiff gold thread “bandaids” that document a different time in this pandemic – the transition into circulation and the promise of future gatherings with family and friends.

The shirt is an artifact of our family’s survival; what remains invisible are grief, loneliness, and frustration in the stitching as we move from one phase of the pandemic into another.

Namita Gupta Wiggers is a writer, educator, and curator based in Portland, OR. She directs the MA in Critical Craft Studies, Warren Wilson College and Critical Craft Forum. She curated "Everything Has Been Material for Scissors to Shape," for the Wing Luke Museum (on view 2016-17).