Still—Moving
Solo exhibition, Planthouse Gallery, 2023
still-moving brings together a series of stitched textiles that chart a period of suspended time and stalled movement.
Each embroidered orb floats or drifts within its field, propelled by a rotational energy, as if still forming, still finding its place. Viewed close up, variations between stitches become visible, distinct, imperfect, tender. The act of making small stitches repeatedly is at once meditative and obsessive—it requires and reveals different kinds of attention. Turning the embroidery hoop around and around, trusting in a rhythm that begins without a prescribed plan, an unexpected coherence slowly emerges. The incremental nature of Watkins’ process elicits something only accessible by making—knowledge that is sensory, intuitive, and elemental.
Like unwitting filters, these works absorbed a changing relationship to distance, space, and living with uncertainty. They both represent, and are made, of time.