meaning to stitch 7 - digging into research
Ruth's latest post about taking research further gave me a chance to think back on my own experience
i am not a straight-line thinker or worker, so i naturally take a broad approach - hovering over the topic and identifying different areas - for textile work visual appeal tends to draw me in, but also stories
but on reflection is see no real pattern in how i decide where to focus - i remember that i struggled with ToT1 - the material initially swamped me because of the quantity - i was drawn in by individual stories but none held my interest for long - eventually it was an exploration of a batch of parchment scrolls which lit the fuse
actually handling and opening scrolls which were centuries old was eye-opening - their condition, the scripts, little margin notes and symbols were all so interesting - this started a direction for me
another direction was found in the tally sticks which we found in the bundle of documents - i had only heard about these and was delighted to get my hands on some - this led to an exploration of the history and use of tally sticks
i linked this back to the business in which the family had made their founding fortune, brewing (probably with hops as they were from the low countries) and also explored encoding and recording business information over the centuries - it was hard to know where and when to stop
i had started with a focus on stitched work, probably flat but moved into mixed media with some textile and stitch in 3D and i felt i was barely touching the surface of what the collection of documents had to offer
on further reflection a missing element in it all is the people, their involvement and the influence on their lives - so that's a different direction i could have taken
so, taking this back to current work - i still want to dig deeper into the people behind my paternal family, so it's time to shift the focus onto their lives
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