A post popped up in my Instagram feed recently, it was from @womensart1 and it featured a piece of knitting done by Sue Montgomery, a city councillor and borough mayor of Montreal. She knits in city council meetings to aid her concentration and decided to change colour each time the gender of the speaker changed. Tellingly, the piece she created on day one was largely red (male speakers) with intermittent strands of green (female speakers).
The significance of the post for me, however, was not the gender data it so elegantly illustrated but the fact that this very post (originally shared by Sue Montgomery on her Twitter feed in 2019) is what inspired my creative explorations which led, over the course of five years, to the creation of Wheway Yarns. I have become a textile artist who turns data into art through craft as a direct result of seeing that Twitter post during the doldrums of the 2020 lockdown.
I think I’ve always joined dots and pulled strands together that others didn’t immediately see as related. I didn’t even notice myself, until recently, how much the very language we use to understand patterns and stories draws on imagery from the world of textiles. In fact, the words ‘text’ and ‘textile’ share their origin in the Latin verb ‘texere’, which means to weave. So perhaps textile artist was the inevitable destination that my life experiences have been drawing me towards all along!
I have also been revisiting my love of Gaeilge and came across the phrase ‘fite fuaite’, which means interwoven or inextricably mixed together. I particularly love the sentence Teanglann.ie uses to illustrate its use: Tá sé fite fuaite ann, it is in the fibre of his being.
The stories I’ve woven to date include pieces illustrating gender balance at Board level – in the Fortune500 and, closer to home, in the Irish Public, Private and Non-profit sectors as well as a piece on child homelessness, which covered data from 2014 – 2021 and which I’m currently updating to tell the story from 2014-2024, sadly an even more depressing one now that I’ve added the last three years!
In tandem with looking at big social issues, I’ve found ways to represent individual lives creating scarves that track the rainfall and temperature on a birthday for 50 years and ones that represent a calendar with personal dates of significance marked by motifs as well as one that tracked changes in job and homeplace through a lifetime.
I’m excited to finally have a place to display and share this work, with the launch of Wheway Yarns website, and to engage people in conversation and curiosity, which is what got me here in the first place.
What stories do you think may be hiding in plain sight? What data would you like illuminated in a tangible way to spark a different conversation?