Sue Kramer

VIRTUAL TOUR

ARTIST CATALOGUE

Stitching Connections
Cutting Threads Again and Again.

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results,” Einstein is believed to have said this. I must therefore be mad as I repeat my patterns over and over again. 

‘But according to quantum mechanics you can do the same thing many times and get different results. This is the premise underlying great high-energy particle colliders. In those colliders, physicists bash together the same particles in precisely the same way, trillions upon trillions of times’ (Wilczek, 2015).

I felt somewhat mad, somewhat absurd sewing over and over, but as I used the language of sewing it was the repetition and the unexpected that attracted my attention.  

In my Exhibition Stitching Connections, I have used sewing, sewing machines, cloth, thread, plastic, pins, needles, the linearity of the stitch, the industrial nature of the machine, the textile industry, and waste as poetic devices to guide me in whatever way the thread would lead. The materials and process led me to examine the concept of repetition and the concept of the unexpected that occurs within that repetition. 

‘Repetition goes by many names: accumulation, appropriation, copying, imitation, obsession, pattern, proliferation, recontextualization, recurrence, re-enactment, remixing, replication, reproduction, return, rhythm, and ritual. Repetition can be a form of discipline or, paradoxically, a method for experimentation; for many artists, it is a way of exhausting an idea or exorcising an experience. Divergent in motivation and effect, these works are united and illuminated by one truth: a thing repeated is never precisely the same’ (Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation [online], 2020).