Margaret Timbrell
The repurposing of items instead of buying new occupies my thoughts lately. I frequent Goodwill and recently came across vintage embroidery stitch kits. These are like the needlework version of a coloring book if the coloring book also provided all the markers as well as detailed instructions on how to color the pictures. Of course I bought the kits but I was at a loss as to what to do with them so I set them aside both mentally and physically.
Simultaneously I've been keeping an extra special little diary dedicated to the autocorrect fails that I receive from my friends and family. It entertains me how autocorrect asserts itself into our lives, sometimes altering real words to other real words, changing the entire meaning of a conversation while maintaining some of the original structure. I admire its sense of humor but also frequently find there is a deeper meaning, a deeper way that technology redirects our lives.
So I was staring at my Sunset Stitchery kits and thinking about purpose/re-purpose, while words and phrases percolated on the back burner. I like the look of the printed Aida cloth that comes in the stitch kits, the ready to go nature of the image. The images are sweet; saccharine sometimes, nostalgic often. The stitch kit destiny is to stitch over this image, replicate it the same but different. The stitcher follows the original structure but inserts variation. And then boom, thoughts connected and I realized that this is like autocorrect. Autocorrect takes the destiny of a sentence and repeats it back to you, but different. If your composed sentence is the printed Aida cloth, then autocorrect is the stitcher changing the image...which means I AM AUTOCORRECT.
For more information about the artist, please visit her website.