i mend while she sleeps
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An attempt to stay connected to my practice offering a visible mending service during my daughter’s nap time. I try to escape this new status of ‘stay at home mother’ choosing to spend the limited free time I have to take care of someone else. I question the challenges we face when becoming mothers, the changes of identity and perception. By giving a new life to people’s garments I dive even more into domesticity blurring the lines between art and craftsmanship.
Text by Jade Decock
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Moths have co-evolved with humans for thousands of years. These badasses resist all kinds of extreme weather, they can create their own water, break down plastic and digest heavy metals. Moths are no picky eaters, and will settle for clean polyester if need be – but these days are particularly good for the golden critter. Its reproduction cycle accelerates in warm drawers and it feasts on the sweaty, natural fibers of our cold-washed cashmere cardigans. Climate change and green capitalism suit it well. Maybe one day we will enlist them to digest those mountains of fast-fashion leftovers that are now visible from space.
So far however, we haven’t learned how to forge alliances with our drawers-mates. Or have we? As she reweaves what her feral companion has undone, Toufan Hosseiny makes me wonder. Mum moth lays 200 eggs in a nice yummy fold and dies. Her job is done, when ours begins. Together with our all-too-human babies, her hungry little larvae will feast on our precious time, energy, bodies. Both disrupt business-as-usual. Both are unruly critters that beg the question: who will mend the holes of patchy Anthropocene?
We live in a world that has forgotten the necessary work of regeneration, the practices of caring and nurturing, the work of maintaining and beginning again. For i mend while she sleeps is no creation ex-nihilo. i mend while she sleep is about mending. Toufan mends, and as she mends, she gathers stories and fabricates another identity for herself. Moths make space, her needle takes over. Toufan ties the loose ends of an old jumper with asmall world of her own fantasy. The carefully selected colors irradiate a scar in a forgotten garment, opening a subtle window of possibility. Interspecific constellations of love and exhaustion emerge, and so does a social fabric.
My mum’s pullover, which I shamelessly stole to her, has landed in the hands of another mother, through a wormhole connecting us across distance and generations: nap-time. One might have a room of one’s own, but nap time is no time for marketable innovation. Nap time is patchy, fragmented, precarious. Nap time is miraculous and frustrating. Nap time is never one’s own, always shared, hinging on the snoring critter in the next room. Like Penelope’s shroud, i mend while she sleeps is a work without telos. Slowly, patiently, endlessly, the chaotic and draining experience of motherhood is woven into the white cube. But Toufan does not stop there. She has invented a stratagem to outwit the artworld’s suitors and patriarchy’s enclosure. What if we could expand the boundsof interdependence? What if the fragile temporality of maintenance could connect us across the confined spaces of domesticity? Bartering handicraft for art, words for colors, stories for naps, Toufan’s needle opens a revolutionary path towards (re)generation. A path where domestic networking is no longer an oxymoron.
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Pictures by Menno de Jong