Lockdown

by Catherina Petit-van Hoey

April 2020

This work was created following an on-line Community Stitch Challenge directed by Cas Holmes for TextileArtist.org

We are living on the 9th floor in an apartment in Valencia, Spain. This is the 3rd week we are in lockdown and apart from the occasional walk to the supermarket and back, we are not allowed out on the streets. Let alone to the nearby beach, the beautiful Turia riverbed park, or the foothill mountains. So occasionally we go to the roof of our building for some fresh air. We avoid going when we hear that other people are up there, which we can hear from the banging metal door upstairs.

So this little work, called ‘Lockdown’, depicts us on the roof.

The little metal tag, which I found there, became the metal door. The green fabric scraps are from my just finished work, called Self Isolation. The blue fabric is from an old skirt, which I also used in the EG project ‘Home’. The fabric with the Spanish script is from a cotton bag which had paella rice in it, which grows in the Albufera National park, outside Valencia.

The other fabrics are dyed with leftover henna. After colouring my hair with henna the last 30 years or so, I have decided to use this not-going-out time to turn gracefully grey.

The padlock shows the date we went in lockdown. The satellite dish, (although for TV) indicates the importance of satellites, especially communication satellites, as we are experiencing now.

Also my husband, now working from home, works in satellites and is employed here for a 3-year project for ESA.

The Valencian orange in the sky presents the surreal time we find ourselves in.

As I didn’t have any watercolour paper here to stitch my work on, I decided to fit my work in a carton vegetable tray.