A Subversive Stitch by Fiona Dempster -SOLD OUT!

This book was developed as part of the international collaboration BookArtObject, Edition Four, Group 2. The title was one of 100 short stories in An Exercise for Kurt Johannessen (2010), by Sarah Bodman and is used with the author’s permission. The title was selected by me and the edition developed in response to the title. Other BAO artists selected other titles. My mind wandered across several different thoughts and approaches for this book and I settled on a combination of ideas around women's work and stitching, darning, and embroidering; about censorship and letters written home during the wars where sentence were blacked out, leaving the safe words showing; about stitching to remove words and leaving others; about history where men mostly got to write it and women weren't featured.  Quite an amalgam. I machine-stitched the words away on the cover, leaving the important ones behind, with threads dangling madly everywhere – a little bit subversive perhaps?  On the inside pages, the words are sealed in place and can’t be easily removed or erased; and yet the tracing paper makes it a bit hard to discern what is written. The words are printed on paper where I had also printed an image of the threads off all the covers. I usually work in very subdued tones; but this red seemed just right for the subject and I loved playing with it.