Tag: art

Dancing Through It

During my husband’s cancer treatment, when the days were measured out in appointments and blood counts and the strange, suspended time of waiting rooms, I found myself stitching three embroideries at once. It wasn’t planned. It was simply what my hands reached for when my mind couldn’t settle.

One was Cézanne’s Skulls; a blunt little memento mori, because death was suddenly no longer an abstraction but a visitor who might or might not come inside.

A second piece was the two hands from the Sistine Chapel: creation, re‑creation, the possibility of being remade.

And the third was Renoir’s La danse à Bougival — life, movement, colour, and the stubborn insistence that joy still exists somewhere, even if only in thread. (In my head, my inner 15-year-old who survived the ’70s still insists on translating it as The Dance at Boogie Ville.)

My hands rotated between them like a tarot reading for our future, pulling the thread of death in the morning, creation in the afternoon, and the dance at night. Holding all three threads at once because we didn’t yet know what the prognosis would be.

Renoir painted his dancers in 1883, all flirtation and whirl, the world blurred around them. A moment of pleasure caught mid‑spin. The Belle Époque loved that kind of scene — the fantasy of effortless joy, untouched by illness or fear or the price of survival. A world where nothing truly bad happens, at least not on the canvas.

But I stitched my dancers in a very different world.

Embroidery is slow. It’s repetitive. It’s the opposite of a sweeping painterly gesture. Each stitch is a small decision to continue. A tiny act of faith. Renoir’s dancers move quickly; mine accumulated over weeks, in the quiet hours between scans and consultations, in the evenings when we didn’t yet know which way the story would go.

Somewhere along the way, the embroidery stopped being about Renoir at all. The dancers became us in meaning, two people trying to keep moving while the world tilted. Two people holding on to the possibility of life, even when life felt precarious.

Queer life has always been lived in that tension: fragility on one side, insistence on the other. We have a long history of caretaking in the dark, of building sanctuaries when the world outside feels indifferent. We make beauty in the middle of fear. We build domesticity not as an idyll but as a shelter. We create altars out of ordinary things — a stitched picture, a kitchen table, a quiet evening when nothing dramatic happens except that we are still here.

The AI‑generated room in which I placed the photo of my embroidery makes it look like a shrine, which in a way it is. The surrounding space is minimalist, immaculate, and stark, mimicking the quiet, clinical suspension of the waiting rooms we left behind. But in the centre sits this dense, textured artifact of human touch. A small domestic altar to survival. A reminder that while we waited for news that could have broken us, I sat and stitched a dance.

Renoir painted the moment before the world intrudes.

I stitched it while the world was already intruding, and somehow that made the dance matter more.

My husband survived, and the dance went on. The embroidery became less a shrine to fear and more a reminder of what we carried through.

Life didn’t return to what it had been: illness like that never lets you go back. But we went on, into a different life, one we’re still learning how to inhabit.

Starry Night, Slowed Down

Some images refuse to stay in museums. They slip into living rooms, onto mugs, into cross‑stitch patterns, and onto the quiet surfaces of kitchen tables. Van Gogh’s sky – once a storm of paint and urgency – becomes something smaller and steadier when translated into thread. The turbulence softens. The night becomes patient. A masterpiece becomes a domestic object, stitched slowly in the pauses of a day.

On the table, my embroidery gathers its own weather. Scissors, a thimble, numbered skeins of blue and yellow – they orbit the little canvas like minor moons. The whole thing looks less like a craft project and more like a still life that’s been caught mid‑breath. A famous sky, reduced to a handful of stitches, sits there as if it has always belonged among the bookshelves and the patterned rug. As if the cosmos has agreed, just this once, to come indoors and behave itself.

Thread doesn’t copy a painting; it translates it. Every stitch is a decision about what to keep, what to simplify, what to let go. Van Gogh’s spirals – made in a fever of colour and memory – settle into neat squares of Ultramarine and Cadmium yellow. The cypress, once a dark flame licking at the sky, becomes a softened silhouette. The stars glow without shouting. Turbulence becomes tactility. The night becomes something you can hold in your hand.

It’s strange, the way certain images follow you through a life. Starry Night was once the sort of thing I saw on posters in student flats, or on the walls of bars where the jukebox played Don McLean and everyone pretended not to be heartbroken. Later, it turned up in unexpected places – on tea towels, in museum gift shops, in the background of conversations I barely remember. And now here it is again, stitched into fabric on a table in a quiet Dutch room, as if it has been waiting for this moment of domestic calm.

Maybe that’s what happens with the things we think we know. They return in altered forms. They ask to be looked at again. They become gentler with age – or perhaps we do.

Van Gogh painted his sky from memory, a view out of an asylum window at a world he wasn’t quite part of. I understand that more than I’d like to admit. I doubt he imagined it would one day be recreated in thread by people who find solace in the slow, repetitive work of making. There’s something comforting in the idea that a painting born of restlessness can end up as a small, steady object on a table – a reminder that even the wildest nights can be translated into something gentler with enough time and enough thread. Turbulence doesn’t last forever, but the marks it leaves can still be beautiful.

On the table, the stitched sky waits. The tools rest. The room holds its breath. And in the quiet, the night becomes something else entirely – not a masterpiece, not a symbol, not a cultural shorthand, but a small, steady reminder that even the wildest storms can be softened by time, by labour, by the simple act of making something with your hands.

A slow, starry night, after everything.