​As another strange and fractured year moves onwards, I am hitting an autumnal creative surge. Some people find new momentum in January when the new year begins, for others it is the spring that gets sap rising but for myself, possibly because my birthday falls in the last days of August, autumn is the beginning, a time where there is sufficient energy and hope to make new plans.
This year I am looking at showing my most recent projects: KILLING KEVIN and MANIFESTO FOR A NEW NORMAL in a context that explores the wider traditions of stitching how we feel. The sewing of text is, in some ways, a strange choice. It is labour-intensive - it's certainly quicker to pick up a sharpie and scrawl a note. And embroidery takes the written word out of the journal, off the writing paper and the screen and onto new, potentially incongruous territories. Some time ago, when considering  the choice to embroider  KILLING KEVIN I wrote that it felt like a no-brainer that ‘these words needed to be pierced…, pulled, looped and tightened – needle-worked into form.' Since I was no seamstress, I had to learn my craft on the job, stitching, unpicking, and re-stitching the fifty-four handkerchiefs that make up this piece. When I worried that my choice was ridiculous, I took heart from Louise Bourgeois’ own handkerchief I HAVE BEEN TO HELL AND BACK. AND LET ME TELL YOU, IT WAS WONDERFUL. If it is good enough for Louise, who was I to argue?
While Killing Kevin told my personal story of cancer treatment,  MANIFESTO FOR A NEW NORMAL flowed from our shared experience of the pandemic. People were longing for the life they had lost but there was also a real examining of what they might choose to change once ‘normality’ returned. Be it through #MeToo the response to murders of women on our streets, or #BlackLivesMatter, the toppling of Colston’s statue and protest at the murder of George Floyd; people were looking at the entrenched, the ‘that’s the way things are’ and saying, enough. In my manifesto I focused, once again, on societal shame and the disguises it demands and begets. I declared it was time to ditch this vicious cycle. Stitching for a new life is nothing new for a woman. For centuries mothers expecting a child made their layettes. While brides-to-be and their sisters, aunts, mothers, and grandmothers made linens for their ‘bottom drawers,’ undergarments for their trousseaux and, yes, handkerchiefs, all embroidered with the initials of their owners, who, once transformed by the marriage ritual, could begin life anew. This is why I chose to sew my manifesto demands on christening garments, linens, gloves, and fans.
 
I am in the early stages of research, but have begun to find some intriguing historic examples of embroidered text, most extraordinary of all is the Elizabeth Parker Sampler, in the V&A's collection - poor girl! Once I have a greater sense of where this autumnal exploration is leading. I will let you know!

The buzz around When Shadows Fall continues:

April 3rd 2022
​Sita Brahmachari is speaking at The Oxford Literary Festival 
 
​May 2nd 2022
Sita and I are launching RAVEN TREASURE, an art and storytelling extravaganza 
at The Tunbridge Wells Literary Festival 

 May 12th
When Shadows Fall Paperback Launch 
details TBA

August 24th
RAVEN TREASURE Sita and I perform our art and storytelling extravaganza  at
The official Edinburgh International Festival
booking details TBA 

I do not remember when the times we live in were discussed as often as they currently are. Given the lockdowns, isolations, and occasional threats of annihilation that root us so firmly in an uncertain present, the constant analysis is unsurprising and seems to come in three distinct genres.
 
There’s straight forward yearning for life as it was. We would not be human if we did not long for all those freedoms that we innocently took for granted. There’s desperate denial from conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxers and other extremists. Then there’s the stuff that informed and inspired my latest project: MANIFESTO FOR A NEW NORMAL; the voices raised to protest ‘norms and injustices once accepted as ‘just how things are.’ From Black Lives Matter, #Metoo, Extinction Rebellion, Times Up and others, we are examining the pieces of who we used to be and deciding that we can do better.
 
MANIFESTO FOR A NEW NORMAL is a 10-piece embroidered series made during 2021. It echoes traditional practices of stitching for New Life, such as the Layette, sewed by expectant mothers for their babies and the carefully initialled household linens and bridal finery layed in ‘bottom drawers’ and trousseaux. The working title was, at one point, A REBEL TROUSSEAU. The language of this project explores social demands I no-longer wish to conform with and the precious hopefulness that thoughts of shedding them inspires.
 
HAD ENOUGH? UNLEARN IT. Is one of three embroidered mazes representing the mires of convention that I am interested in challenging. Are you, it asks, good enough? Kind enough? Masked enough? Hollowed enough? Filled enough? Fearless enough? Skilled enough? Wise enough? Wise enough? Seen enough? Hidden enough? Tame enough? Quick enough? Sorry enough? Strong enough? Measured enough? Thin enough? Empathic enough? Shown enough? Obedient enough? Wary enough? Non-Threatening enough? True enough? Feminine enough? Hard enough? Perfect enough? And concludes HAD ENOUGH? UNLEARN IT. This call to unlearn old rules first appeared in the concluding work of my 54-piece series KisforKevin. It seems to be my go-to clarion call for breaking the rules and making real, positive change! I love the joy of the christening gowns and bonnets: BEGINNING AGAIN? BE TRUE THIS TIME, THE WORLD IS IN NEWNESS. THIS IS A TIPPING POINT, JUST BE TRUE.
 
This is my manifesto. Let's explore what needs to change!

You are invited to my talk and Q&A for Ro2ART
Host: Jordan Roth.
Time: 8pm GMT on Sunday May 16th.
YES! THAT’S TOMORROW!
Just click here: http://ro2.us/nataliesirettarttalk to join the Zoom meeting.

​Antidotes to Fear of Death
Sometimes as an antidote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars.
Those nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quenching dark
Til they are all, all inside me,
Pepper hot and sharp.
Sometimes, instead, I stir myself
Into a universe still young,
Still warm as blood:
No outer space, just space,
The light of all the not yet stars
Drifting like a bright mist,
And all of us, and everything
Already there
But unconstrained by form.
And sometime it’s enough
To lie down here on earth
Beside our long ancestral bones:
To walk across the cobble fields
Of our discarded skulls,
Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,
Thinking: whatever left these husks
Flew off on bright wings.