These Restless Hands

My mother crochets a scarf. Her hands twist this way and that in her lap, looping the fluffy yarn around her crochet hook to create stitch after stitch. She is making a woollen scarf, for no one in particular. When she is finished, she will unravel all her stitches, and start again.

She sits in her living room beneath a lamp in a shower of light, the clicking dance of her crochet needle diving and hooking the yarn as her hands turn in and out. My mother’s hands have been busy stitching since she was a young girl. She learned her craft from her mother, a gifted professional seamstress, who taught her first to hand-sew using scraps of old bedsheets. My grandmother showed her daughter how to seam, to mend, to darn and embroider, and to knit and crochet clothes for her doll; as my mother taught me…

The film is constructed from a series of frames, extracted from a short piece of filming shot as QuickTime video on a stills camera. My filming frames my mother’s hands in her lap, as she was crocheting a woollen scarf early one evening, shortly after moving home in autumn 2007. When she had finished making, my mother pulled out her stitches and unravelled the scarf, reconstituting the yarn into a ball of wool once again.

To create the film, I printed out 143 PAL digital video frames (720 x 576) onto sheets of white A4 copier paper, in landscape format, using a laser printer with its (black) toner cartridge running out. I re-photographed each still image on an animation rostrum with a Canon 60-D DSLR. Then I imported the jpgs onto the QuickTime timeline to 'stitch together' the sequence as a moving image stream, with a duration of 6 frames per image and a one frame overlap at the beginning and end of the series. This sequence is looped, endlessly, and shows my mother’s hands repetitively making and unmaking.

[Digital stop motion of photographic prints]