EDINBURGH
JOAN - change
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Joan sewed with me in the 1980s as part of an ambitious textile project in Edinburgh called Pictures of Leith where over two hundred local people stitched down their community's past, present and future. Joan was working in a day care centre at the time and the elderly women there sewed a version of the steamie, the old wash house, where they would go each week to do their laundry and catch up on news. Joan recreated their picture for her wall hanging, using it to explore the theme of change: the changes in women's lives since the days when her crofting grandmother made all the family's clothes; the changes in her own life since the 1980s and the changes in Leith itself from a neighbourhood of dockland industry, to a impoverished community to its regeneration as the multi-cultural heartland of the city.
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Eve has used her cloth to tell of her coming to Edinburgh as a young wife to set up a pottery business in Edinburgh with her husband. Money was very short in those days and, when her first baby Jim was born, Eve recycled a pair of her own jeans to make him a little pair of dungarees. Life for Eve has always been about making something from very little: making a new life, making craft and clothes from what she could find around her, making a family and friends in a new place. On her wall hanging are photographs of herself in her original pair of jeans, Jim as a toddler wearing his dungarees and Eve as she is today holding up the dungarees she keeps as a memento of those early days in Edinburgh when she was making work, home and family in a new city.
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EVE - renew
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LUCY - work
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Lucy is now eighty-seven years old. She has been sewing since she was fourteen when she was apprenticed to a top class dressmaker. She came to Edinburgh when she was eighteen and found a place in Mr Allan's dress shop where she worked for the next twenty years, servicing the fashion needs of the city. When Mr Allan retired she took over the business and made it her own, renaming it Lucy's Fashions. She ran her business for another twenty years. Lucy still sews. Her wall hanging shows her business card, the tools of her trade, her delivery van and a parade of the changing fashion she helped to create over fifty years.
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BILL & JIM - identity
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Bill (97), Protestant and Jim (87), brought up Catholic, became close friends. But when they were young such a friendship would have been unthinkable. They grew up in the days of a sectarian Scotland. Bill remembers the sash his mother wore to Anti-Catholic Protestant Action rallies in the 1930s. It cost her ten shillings. Jim left the Catholic faith when his sister was excommunicated by the local priest for marrying her soldier-sweetheart in a registry office. In later life both were involved together in anti-sectarianism projects. Sadly Jim died shortly after helping to design and create this wall hanging.
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