Kular family scroll
Reflections on a slow-stitched scroll essay in-progress
Over the past six weeks I’ve been working on my longest scroll to date, The Kular family scroll. I keep changing the name of this piece from ancestral/sibling scroll to Kular family scroll. I don’t think this piece wants to be tied to a name yet.
After creating each panel intuitively and separately to a point where I feel ‘that’s enough for now’, I joined all the panels together with some unruly stitching. Even I was shocked at how long they’ve become. I could’ve kept going as there were a few text pieces I wanted to add to the overall narrative. I held myself back as I’m also mindful of how this scroll will eventually be exhibited (that’s the dream, an exhibition).
My next step is to stitch text to the piece and some details that will bring the whole scroll together. This work has been enormous joy. I’ve channelled my mother’s trinket cabinet full of souvenirs from Blackpool to Punjab to Canada: decorative glitter globes (a penguin floating across water in front of Golden Temple, really), Indian wedding dolls and all things sparkly.
My tiny inner Tiny Dal around six years old gave instructions too. She wanted all the trims and shimmer. And finally, I took inspirations from the tiny temple that lived in one of the attics in our big old childhood home bedecked in golden foil decorations, tinsel and hangings ~ all year round.
I haven’t held back on this piece. I haven’t planned apart from the photos and the fabric panels. From then on it was stitching to my heart’s joy without a thought for colour palette or what would go with what. A clash. A melting pot. Fragments pulled together. Earth and sparkle. Joy and sadness. Remembrance and recording.
Stitching a family back together when we all ate Mum’s cooking from aloo gobi to McCains Cheesy pancakes and oven chips (remember the cooking oil that lived under the sink, used over and over and over?), argued, cried, watched The Six Million Dollar Man, Top of the Pops and Bollywood videos and played in one big living room, in one big home. Life was tough. Life was also full of laughter, joy, solidarity and mischief.
As well as feeling deep joy and nostalgia whilst creating this scroll, memories stitching through to the surface, I also found myself experiencing deep grief. A profound sense of loss of how things were, the loss of an analogue age where things felt more innocent. The loss of a togetherness that adulthood inevitably disrupts as we make our own way in life. The loss of my parents, two incredible people who made a life and four children over here from nothing and a lot of hard graft. From literally a quid in my Dad’s pocket as he arrived in Birmingham in 1954. The loss of childhood hopes and dreams. A deep grief for this world and all the head-fuckery and madness going on.
As I continue with my scroll-making practice, I sometimes ask myself what am I doing here? Why am I making these scrolls? What’s the purpose? Does it matter? Do they matter? In a world that’s burning how is this practice making a difference? I don’t know the answers. honestly, I really don’t know. All I do know, is that I need to make these scrolly beings. I’m pulled to stitching these fabric essays, to pulling thread through cloth, through memory. To some kind of internal rearrangement of cells and soul-space. Perhaps the stitching is internal decluttering. Sense-making. Space-making. For what, I don’t know.
Or maybe it’s enough to make for making’s sake? To make for pure joy and delight. I think in world that’s burning, perhaps that’s enough?
