Sewn text is rarely used to document. It has traditionally been used on nursery and schoolroom samplers as a preliminary to more advanced embroidery techniques.
One rare and notable exception is a piece made by Elizabeth Parker in 1830 (V&A Textiles) when she was seventeen. Her harrowing story is told in seventeen hundred words of meticulous sewn red cross stitch. The narrative starts as a biography documenting her employment as a nursery maid and the thoughts of suicide that resulted from the cruel treatment she received with the words “ As I cannot write ”. Her use of text as image and language overturns our preconceptions about the domestic uses of embroidery, and subverts our expectations.
An isolated letter that is not part of a word has no intrinsic meaning. It belongs to another category altogether. A letter is primarily read as an image. In the Lacanian tripartite system it belongs to the register of the Real which is inexplicable. If text is read initially as image a similar event occurs.
Unlike the drawn line the stitch occupies space three dimensionally. The thread continuously disappears behind its support and reappears for the next stitch. The under side, which might be a tangle of loops and knots or a perfect mirror image of the front is unseen. In order to read the surface the under working has to be ignored. The illusion of the perfect under side is never referred to yet acknowledgement of its existence is intrinsic to the understanding of the surface. Back to Stitched Pictures