Waiting Room

Artists

• Heather Watkins

Statement

These works were made in waiting rooms of one kind or another. Densely hand-stitched abstract forms centered on raw linen, they are shaped by a desire to develop a new visual language and to forge a new working methodology—peripatetic, roving, claiming its own time and space.

By drawing colored sewing thread through cloth, a form emerges, a plan begins to materialize. Each work builds incrementally through the repetition of stitches made with thin thread. The stitches are tiny—they test the limits of my eyesight.

Shape, color, density, pattern, rhythm—these decisions are determined by an urge to distill and integrate a variety of influences, information, ideas: how textiles carry meaning; the work of artists such as Anni Albers, Sheila Hicks, Agnes Martin; the practice of Tantric painting; the growth patterns of organic forms, both in the body and in nature; the visual structure of a text; images generated for diagnostic testing; how our senses, emotions, and intellect intersect; the sensation of reading.

The act of making small stitches repeatedly, following the regular yet imperfect structure of woven cloth, is at once meditative and obsessive—it requires and reveals different kinds of attention. This work activates waiting. This work records the labor of being (a) patient. This work is made of time and representative of it.

Heather Watkins