2025
Medium: Hand-felted wool, reclaimed thread, vintage frames
Dimensions:
A Record of Mending — 12″ × 10″
Palimpsest — 9″ × 6″
Testament — 9″ × 6″
Price / Status: $1,145 (Available)
Exhibition History: None
Themes: Harm → healing → survival; trauma; memory; repair; scars; survival as testimony
Artist Statement:
Tender Remains is a triptych of fiber-based reliquaries that explore how trauma lives in the body—and how the act of healing is rarely linear. Each piece is made with hand-felted wool and embroidery thread, materials selected for their ancestral and emotional resonance. Felt tangles and changes under pressure, just as the psyche does. Stitching, learned from the women in my Afrikaans lineage, becomes both ritual and rebellion: a method of constraint, repair, and resistance.
In A Record of Mending, pink scars beneath the surface speak to old pain, while black whip stitches mark newer acts of healing. Palimpsest reveals criss-crossed scars, layered upon one another—some self-inflicted, others inflicted by hands I once trusted. It is a visual diary of harm endured and internalized. Testament traces the veins of my wrist, a vulnerable site still pulsing with life. These blue threads are both anatomical and symbolic: a private declaration that I am still here.
Displayed as a triptych, these works ask viewers to become intimate witnesses—to hold space for what cannot be said, but can be felt. This is not a glorification of suffering. It is a soft archive of endurance, self-forgiveness, and the ongoing labor of becoming whole.
