I wonder if Harry found comfort in the slow drawing of thread through cloth. For me, the calm solitude of stitching has offered healing and solace during difficult times.
Artist Statement
My grandfather Harry’s fate was sealed just before his 20th birthday, when he was injured by an exploding shell at Gallipoli. The shrapnel fragments that remained forever embedded in his skull caused excruciating, debilitating pain.
Repatriated after many months in English military hospitals, Harry’s health progressively failed. He died aged 34, leaving his English war bride to care for their young children at the height of the Great Depression. Confined to bed for his last five years, he embroidered household textiles featuring the English flowers his wife fondly remembered.
Although long gone, Harry set my course in life. I grew up surrounded by his embroideries, faded and threadbare from years of use, and gained an understanding of the memory embedded in timeworn cloth. I use old cloth in my work because each stain and hole speaks volumes. Whilst Harry stitched roses for his English bride, my stitches most often trace small wonders encountered in my native garden or along the water’s edge.
Harry’s threads, still stored where he placed them between the pages of a magazine, are among my most precious possessions. Almost a century later I have stitched them into a torn remnant of his cloth in a work that honours my grandparents. The impact of Harry’s ill-health was brutal but they faced adversity with awesome courage and tenacity.
I wonder if Harry found comfort in the slow drawing of thread through cloth. For me, the calm solitude of stitching has offered healing and solace during difficult times.
Biography
Artist Wendy Lugg rescues old cloth, embedded with memory, and gives it new life in stitched artworks, often presented alongside photographic works and historical artefacts, creating dialogues between them. Fabric, thread and the camera lens have been her lifelong companions.
In a thirty year career, Wendy has held solo exhibitions in seven countries, and is internationally respected in her field, both as a maker and for her broader arts practice. This includes exhibiting and teaching internationally, curating exhibitions, undertaking arts residencies, writing about the arts and serving on arts and museum committees. Her awards include a Churchill Fellowship and an Australia Council New Work grant.
Wendy has been Artist in Residence with the Royal Western Australian Historical Society since 2009. Her award winning 2011 exhibition Mapping Memory, a collaboration with the Royal WA Historical Society and the State Library of Western Australia, juxtaposed historical artefacts and contemporary artworks to explore place, history and identity, themes which have always been central to her work. In 2015 this exhibition was converted to a permanent online exhibit viewable on the State Library of WA website.
Connect
Website: wendylugg.com
Website: webarchive.slwa.wa.gov.au/mappingmemory
list of works
Wendy Lugg
Not a Bed of Roses 4
2020-2024
Repurposed vintage fabrics, thread, shells
102cm x 35cm
NFS
Artwork