October 12th , 2022

In a Somerset nursing home, an elderly man tells me how he used to help his grandmother untangle waste silk thread that his grandpa brought home from Pearsalls silk-spinning mill. This thread (referred to colloquially as ‘bird’s nests’) could be purchased by the workers for sixpence. Once untangled, his grandmother would use it to crochet tablemats. With a buttonhook that I produce from my sewing box, he improvises. His hands remember. In another care home, a ninety year old former mender from Fox’s woollen mill, who mended by needle-weaving, the finest flannel cloth as it flew off the noisy looms, recalled a different kind of mending; tending at home, a baby owl, which perched for awhile upon her mantlepiece. 

Images conflate and contrast. Of domesticity and industry. The aspiration to invisible work in the mending room - and more tangible creativity at home. When working in a woollen mill myself, my fingerprints would often be worn so smooth from feeling for knots and burls in hundreds of metres of cloth, the clocking out machine couldn’t identify me. These days my finger prints are fully restored. And with them comes the urge to use my hands to create my own work once more; to make things that have my own fingerprint.

Birds are consummate weavers and embroiderers. Their creations designed for invisibility. Referring to nest building, the ornithologist Mike Hansel writes of them as having ‘bodkin beaks’. I love that image. Inspired by the birds’ magnificently quiet, invisible creations, by their ability to use the same ‘tool’ with which they both fabricate and sing, working from my small home studio in Somerset, I name this enterprise ‘Bodkin Beak’...