Labor of Love
2020
Love imposes impossible tasks.
In the traditional English ballad, “Scarborough Fair,” a lover is asked to complete impossible tasks—to make a shirt with no needlework, to find an acre of land between the salt water and sea, or to thresh a field with a bunch of heather. The labors of love are impossible labors. In my film, Labor of Love, labor is seemingly never-ending, it’s completion is impossible. My film Labor of Love records abstract, frenetic stitching frame by frame.
As the film progresses, smocking stitches multiply and overlap, pulling again and again. The fabric, taught in its frame, buckles and scrunches towards its center. The stitch becomes a powerful action, transforming the entire fabric. Stitches are shot from the back and front of the fabric, creating a doubling of labor and time, revealing traditionally invisible labor and disrupting linear filmic time. As the film unfolds, diegetic sound gives way to a broken dance tune as stitches multiply and the natural light fades and darkens—then, a break to live action. Hands stitch in real time and the voices of an older couple sing a folk song, falling in and out of step with each other.
Needle’s eye, thou dost supply
The thread that runs so truly;
Many a beau, have I let go
Because I wanted you.
Because I wanted you,
Because I wanted you,
Many a beau, have I let go
Because I wanted you.
The couple sings while two hands perform their own duet on screen, working in tandem to stitch, knot and re-stitch. The voices were recorded by American paleontologist and wildlife conservationist E.L. Simon’s in 1952. Then twenty one, Simons recorded his grandparents singing folk songs they learned in Kansas in the 1880s and 1890s.12 As Frank and Myrtle Simons sing of threading, attachment, love, dance, and devotion, the hands on screen continue to stitch. Soon, the song is done and the hands leave the screen leaving the last thread uncut. The embroidery could be continued: devotion is without end.
In the installation version of Labor of Love, stitching hands are projected in diminutive scale inside the tangle of embroidered and knotted stitches made over the course of the film. The stitches are a record of cinematic time. The embroidery remains on the wooden frame in which it was made as if it could be taken up again at any point. The looping hands embroider and re-embroider, continuously attaching themselves to the fabric, tethered by thread—their projected presence both fleetingly spectral and hauntingly constant. In Labor of Love, the abstraction of a smocking stitch pulls the surface of the fabric. Each stitch tears and mends with thread bridging the two punctures created by the needle. As stitches accumulate the thread becomes shorter, bringing me closer and closer to my material. My hand is tied to the embroidered surface with needle and thread like an umbilical cord or anchor.