Untold Stories

From left to right: Fate Weaving, Shroud, Muted
The fabrics in all three pieces are all wool samples from local mills.

Our Thread Running Through exhibition at Cliffe Castle is full of stories and none more so than Jo Valentine's work.  In her artist's statement, she imagines the stories that women spinning the yarn in pre-industrial weavers cottages would have told to each other.  They are reproduced here for your delight and delectation!

Story 1 : Muted

Muted (detail)

When the mills came, the noise of the machinery drowned out the possibility of storytelling whilst the workers made the cloth. Their voices could no longer be heard, and this reminded me of the story of the twelve swan princes ….. 12 princes are turned into swans by a wicked stepmother and can only be rescued by their sister making each of them a shirt from nettle fibre she has gathered, spun and woven. Throughout this process she must remain silent. Whilst engaged on this task, a passing prince carries her off to his castle and marries her against the wishes of his mother. The princess is wrongly accused of witchcraft and condemned to burn. En route to the fire, she is desperately stitching the last shirt and as she is taken from the cart, 12 swans swoop down and she throws the shirts over their heads and all are released from the enchantment….

The small weaving at the top is made with nettle fibre.

Story 2 : Shroud

Shroud (detail)

From Homer’s Odyssey, Penelope sits in her palace on the remote Greek island of Ithaka, awaiting the return of her husband, Odysseus at the end of the long Trojan war he has been fighting. Weeks, months and then years pass and he doesn’t return, off on many great adventures elsewhere. The young nobles on the island demand that Penelope remarry to give the island a ruler and she knows that doing so will not only betray her husband but condemn her young son to almost certain death at the hands of her new husband. So she argues that although she has no body to bury, she must first weave a shroud for her husband, and then she when she has completed the normal period of mourning she can remarry. Each day she sits at her loom weaving the shroud, and each night she carefully unpicks it so that it can never be finished. 

I wanted to use wool from a remote island for my weaving so this came from the Shetland isles. The stones represent loom weights and also the burden of responsibility Penelope carries.  The golden mask is the death mask of Agamemnon. Unlike Odysseus, at the end of the war he returned home to his wife. Unfortunately she had not been faithful in his absence and had him killed… a mirror image of Penelope’s tale.

Story 3 : Fate Weaving

Set on a remote Scottish island, this is the story of a selkie wife who is captured by a young fisherman when he finds her skin. Desperate to return to the wild, after several years, she finally discovers where he has hidden her skin but by now it is dry and brittle and breaks in pieces in her hands. In despair, she is advised to travel to the oldest woman in the world who sits in a cave half way down a sheer cliff weaving the fates, for only she might be able to help.

The warp yarn of my weaving is sea silk – made from Kelp (seaweed) and silk. I have decorated the piece with pearls, sea glass and shells, most of the latter picked up from a beach on the Scottish island of Harris.