Rosi and I moved to Carlisle in 1997, and she was now a Social Worker with the Sure Start Project for under five year old children. After my failure to raise lottery funding in the previous year, I got a job as a hospital porter in the Radiology Department of Cumberland Infirmary. This enabled me to buy a sewing machine in order to fulfill an idea that I’d had floating about since we lived in Portsoy. I would make an embroidery…
The embroidery called ‘Glance’ is 1800mm x 450mm and it’s made from rayon thread. The image was taken on a No 76 bus, en route between Portsoy and Aberdeen in Scotland, and it shows the area of the driver’s cab, with his reflections in the windscreen.
Why would one want to photograph such an insignificant scene in the first place, and then spend three months making an embroidery out of it? I mean, it’s not an image ‘of’ any object in particular – just the bits and pieces you’d expect to find in and around any bus driver’s cab. Neither was there anything particularly special about the light. It’s really just a random snap, almost as if the camera had gone off accidentally – almost like the eye drifts around when one’s mind is elsewhere. Almost like a glance.
And that’s just the point, because I was trying to comprehend difference – the sheer radical otherness of things that constitute our understanding. I couldn’t afford to confuse the issue by choosing a particular scene of something like a landscape, which could be mistaken for a well composed picture that could be hung upon a wall.
Quantum entanglement shows that the particulate, grainy structure of the world does not exist ‘in space and time’, but rather that it is in the coalescing of understanding as things different from the others that space and time are formed. Space and time are the interplay of difference among things coalescing. Each small square in the embroidery is not something that exists ‘out there in the distance’, rather each is the myself that manifests itself as an understanding-with the other myselfs (including me-myself-Stan).
It’s not that I understood this clearly – only now in 2020 am I able to form the thoughts enough to write them down. I was mostly concerned with how to make the embroidery…
The photograph of the bus driver’s cab had been sent away to be developed, and I had scanned it into my computer. The challenge was then to make embroidered 5mm squares in colours corresponding as closely as possible to the pixels on the screen. But the thread colours that were available did not match the 256 colours of the computer, and so I had to combine the threads to make the colours that I needed, as is shown in the chart above.