Memorial

My Memorial to the 29 miners who died in the Pike River Coal Mine is finished after one hundred-plus hours  of stitching over several months. It was quite a sad piece to be working on and I'm glad its done now.  

I feel for the families whose sadness has no end, who are still waiting and wishing for the bodies of their men to be recovered.

I entered Memorial for an art award but it wasn't selected, so now its packed away waiting for me to figure out another way to share it out into the world.  Because it is an installation that takes up a lot of floorspace I guess its not easy to slip into a gallery programme.  

Despite the sombre subject and its political implications I think Memorial is beautiful to look at, with so many cones repeating, varied by subtle shades of grey and constructed with deliberately irregular stitching.