In this episode Gary Mansfield speaks to Holly Searle (@the_subversive_stitcher)

For as long as I can remember I have always been making something. In retrospect, I may well have picked this desire to create up from my nan and my mum, who were always making something as well.

I was an analogue child that was closer to the make do and mend generation than the digital children of the 21 century, who have a screen that feeds their desires, but not necessarily their creativity.

​For that I will always be truly grateful.

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I always loved to embroider, but as the years passed and my life became more focused on single parenting and domestic issues, I seemed to have lost the desire to create. I just lost my creative mojo.

Then one day, several years ago, I attended an exhibition on mental health and saw the most incredible sight. It was a sampler that had been sewn by an inmate of a Victorian Asylum.

​The inmate Mary Frances Heaton had used a needle and thread and other accessible materials to petition Queen Victoria about her own personal experiences of her own social injustice that had befallen her.

In that moment, as I stood there looking at this piece. I was transfixed and amazed by her ingenuity and her passion to be heard.

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Her passion reignited my desire to create and to use embroidery and textiles as a basis to draw attention to social issues and to empower women, especially those that deserve more attention than afforded them.

Mary was incarcerated for 41 years, but she never gave up using her voice. I like to think you can hear an echo of her in mine.

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For more information on the work of Holly Searle go to

https://www.thesubversivestitcher.com

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