Roots

Where do exhibitions have their roots? They don’t emerge out of nothing. For A Stitch in Time, the skills I’m using go back a long time, as does the interest in age and fragility, but the pandemic was undoubtedly an important catalyst for this exhibition.

For me, as for many people during lockdown, time became elastic. Unable to function normally as an artist, I headed out on foot to explore my local area. My husband and I tried hard not to walk the same footpath every day and were lucky that there was lots of choice. Favourites emerged though – out to Haw Wood and along the Barnsley Canal tow-path or various different routes to Anglers Country Park.

 It was on these daily walks that the wall started to catch my attention. Not all at once though. In my head I didn’t join up the snippets of wall on one walk with the glimpses I caught on another. The logical jump of linking it up in my head wasn’t helped by the fact that the wall looks so different from one section to the next.

Eventually though, the penny dropped – these weren’t just any old walls I was seeing, they were part of one wall. One circular boundary wall, three miles long. So why is it there? Time for a bit of history.