LONGING
Textile Arts Center, 2021
LONGING explores the universal desire for connection–to another person, to a new country or city, to a better life–and the long, circuitous road along the way.
This piece was shown as part of the Textile Arts Center exhibition With Care in November 2021. This piece was also previously shown in 2019 at the A.I.R. Gallery in Wish You Were Here, an exhibition themed around immigrant rights and advocacy.
What are you longing for?
Where do you feel it burning in your body?
What is it telling you about your past, your present, your future?
What are the stakes? What are the opportunities and challenges along the way?
LONGING, Embroidery on cotton muslin, Bernadette Cay 2021.
LONGING is inspired by immigration, the journey of finding home in oneself, and finding a sense of home wherever our path takes us. The piece is made from reclaimed cotton muslin from Fabscrap, a nonprofit that upcycles and resells textile waste from NYC's textile industry.
Early sketch
I made this sketch during the depths of my first full New York City winter, lonely and in a new city.
Expanding visual vocabulary. Community. Service.
In 2015, I took a workshop with studio mate Jennie Lennick, founder of Jenny Lemons in San Francisco. I loved seeing how she “painted” with embroidery in her fine art practice. In the workshop, we created a sampler of different stitches.
When I decided to explore embroidery for this piece, I knew that having an expanded visual vocabulary of stitches would open up more creative possibilities. So I took a workshop at Maha Rose in Greenpoint to review.
The workshop was led by Tala Barbotin-Khalidy, a fashion designer and an occupational therapy volunteer for Womankind, a non-profit that works with survivors of domestic and sexual violence and human tracking. Tala helps residents find healing in craft. Art for healing has been a theme in my creative practice, starting in college as an Art for Health volunteer at Stanford Hospital, where I led art sessions for patients in their hospital rooms.
As we went over different stitches in the workshop, I could feel the muscle memory of the different stitches coming back. By the end of the night, I was “drawing” with needle and thread. The Stem Stitch especially translates the flowing quality of my ink paintings.
From ink to thread
The Stem Stitch translates the fluid quality of my ink paintings to embroidered fabric and thread.