Weeping Woman - 3

Since working on this piece, I feel as if I should also make a weeping woman for Syria, for Yemen, for Iraq, or ..... India, Burma, North Korea and so on...
or even for mothers of children who never came home from school - gunned down in 'safer' countries.

I came across these words recorded by Jeremiah the Prophet and was amazed that this is the same type of weeping and wailing coming from women of these places of trauma and disaster here in our day.

“Consider now! Call for the wailing women to come;
send for the most skillful of them.
Let them come quickly and wail over us
till our eyes overflow with tears
and water streams from our eyelids.

The sound of wailing is heard from Zion:
‘How ruined we are!
How great is our shame!
We must leave our land
because our houses are in ruins.’”

Now, you women, hear the word of the LORD;
open your ears to the words of His mouth.
Teach your daughters how to wail;
teach one another a lament.

Death has climbed in through our windows
and has entered our fortresses;
it has removed the children from the streets
and the young men from the public squares.

Is it true that we are nearly in 2017 and houses are in ruins so that people must leave their lands? And is it true still that death climbs in through our windows, removing children from the streets and young men from public squares?

This is my Weeping Woman. The colour or place doesn't matter...
But why are we not weeping with her? That should matter!


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By the way, it took me around 2 hours to get all that statement down to the 300 allowed characters!

Weeping Woman - 2

I have done a lot of sewing and unpicking on this. I quilted the headdress, but the quilting I did on the face was wrong.

I put beads on for tears, which looked fine when I did it, but when I went to post it here...it was just not right.
So consider this photo another stage while I work out just how many tears it does want! Or, maybe the colour? I picked the beads to go with the sky, but I probably need to go with clear beads because the blue makes too much contrast.

Weeping Woman

A few weeks ago, I sat on the settee next to the dog for a little break. I looked across out of the patio window to the outdoors and this caught my eye...

The reflection in the window of the house opposite across the back seemed to show a weeping woman.

So, this has stuck in my mind, especially as I still cannot get the weeping mothers and women of Nigeria out of my mind. (The story behind Tears for the Daughters of my People.)

So, when SAQA extended the deadline for the Trunk show submissions, I decided this would be my piece if I could get it made through the travelling and so on we have been doing while my mother-in-law was ill.

Here are a few photos of the steps involved with developing the piece. Most of this was done on Friday when I was still processing the news of my mother-in-law's death.

Little changes here and there. The first was too peaceful of a face and as I went on, then concentrating on the folds of her headdress.

A few more changes have been done, but mostly this is how it looks before the quilting.