Penny Burns
"The Timeless Circle of Life"
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| (Photos by Patrick Fraser) |
Time has sure flown by. In cleaning out our large home to move into an apartment and then doing the same for my parents, the piles of photos needed to be culled. As I was discarding photos of people my children didn’t even know, I became introspective about what these people meant to me in my life: People who loved and supported me; people who I loved as a child that I couldn’t relate to as an adult. The people in my piece empowered me by good and bad examples of human behavior. They all contributed to the person I am today.
My piece contains photos that would have been discarded. I began by piecing old fabrics and slow stitching using white thread. It wasn’t important to me that the stitches showed and in fact most were cut away. It was a thoughtful process that I used to look at and select the photos as I was stitching.
The next step was sewing the photos onto the squares of fabric. I chose black thread and stitched around each photo 3 times. Three has always been my favorite number. It just happened naturally.
Next I constructed the copper tubing armature to hold the photos. I wired the photos onto the armature in a clock-like pattern, the movement of time is inevitable and we have to embrace that reality.