The stitch as line: sewing and repair

For most of the twentieth century, the drawn line and the sewn line sat in separate rooms of the art school. One belonged to the life drawing studio, the other to the home economics corridor where girls were taught to hem a sheet. The hierarchy was strict, and it shaped what could be called fine art, what could be called craft, and whose hands were taken seriously in each. The drawn line moved across paper with graphite, ink, or charcoal, leaving a trace that recorded pressure, speed, and hesitation. The sewn line moved through cloth with thread, building a mark that held weight, caught light, and refused to lie flat. They were, and are, the same gesture in different grammars.

Alexandra Mawimbi's practice sits in the seam between these grammars, and the seam is taken seriously as a site of thought. Her work has long folded textile, video, and sculpture into each other, and the stitch has appeared as a recurring figure, sometimes literal, sometimes as a metaphor for the kind of repair that an image, a body, or a public memory requires. In the humid studios of Brisbane's Fish Lane, in the back rooms of Sydney's Belmore warehouses, and during quieter residencies in regional Victoria, the artist approaches the needle as she approaches the pencil: as a tool for thinking in line. This piece considers what that lineage owes to broader traditions of sewing and repair, and what it offers the contemporary Australian viewer.

The needle as a drawing instrument

A needle entering cloth produces a mark that is at once a point and a trajectory. The motion is small, repeated, and almost illegible at close range, but step back and the eye stitches the perforations into a continuous line. Drawing theorists from William Kentridge to Agnes Martin have described the line as a record of time passing through the hand. Sewing operates in exactly that register, with the added fact that the line is volumetric, that it piles up, knots, and casts shadow. A line of red cotton across white linen is also a low-relief sculpture, and the cloth it sits on becomes a body that has been opened and reclosed.

Mawimbi's two-dimensional works make this equivalence explicit. The same composition can be read as a graph of pressure or as a record of stitch count, and a viewer who leans close can sometimes count the holes before the colour resolves into image. The drawn mark on paper is, in this sense, a flattened photograph of an act that the sewing needle performs in the round. To draw with thread is to remember that drawing was always a haptic activity, even when the discipline forgot.

Repair as a form of attention

Repair is the slow cousin of making. It assumes that something already exists, that it has been broken or worn, and that the mender has decided it is worth the labour of continuation. The Australian tradition of "make do" — the wartime household economy, the patched work shirt on a rural property, the grandmother who re-soled boots through two recessions — is a vernacular mending culture, and it sits underneath any serious discussion of contemporary repair aesthetics. Mending is a refusal of disposal, and in a country drowning in textile waste, that refusal carries visible weight.

The philosophical backbone of repair runs through several traditions. In Japan, the practice of kintsugi treats the broken vessel as the more interesting one, its seams traced in lacquer and gold powder so that the history of damage becomes the history of the object. A similar sensibility runs through Sakao's archive on traditional repair philosophies, where the broken pot, the patched coat, and the rejoined book are gathered as evidence of a different relationship to time. Mawimbi's interest in repair is less decorative than kintsugi and more archival than heritage craft. She treats the act of mending as a model for looking, an instruction to attend to what is fraying rather than to what is whole.

Three modes of repair, as they appear in the work:

The common thread is honesty about the break. The viewer is asked to look at the seam as evidence of care, not as evidence of failure, and the work refuses the fantasy of an undamaged object.

Cloth, country, and colonial residue

To speak of cloth in Australia is to speak in two registers at once. The first is Indigenous and ongoing, and it includes the woven pandanus mats of the Northern Territory, the possum skin cloaks of the southeast, and the string and feather regalia of central and western desert traditions. These practices predate colonial contact, belong to living custodial knowledge, and continue today through artists showing at the Art Gallery of South Australia and the National Gallery of Australia, and through the steady work of community fibre circles on remote homelands. The second register is settler colonial, and it is shorter, more anxious, and more often lost. Embroidered samplers, quilted coverlets, and a soldier's socks tell a different story about distance, longing, and the labour of building a domestic interior in unfamiliar country.

The residue of that second register is everywhere in Australian textile history, and it is part of what makes a sewn line politically charged on this continent. The artist who picks up a needle in Sydney or Melbourne in 2026 is working inside both inheritances, whether she names them or not. The honest practice names them. Mawimbi has spoken about the way her work tries to sit inside that doubled history without collapsing it, and the stitched line in her compositions is one of the places where that negotiation becomes visible. To draw a line of thread in this country is to inherit, however quietly, a long argument about who is permitted to make things, who is paid for them, and whose work is allowed to last.

From the op shop to the white cube

The Australian op shop is one of the great, underexamined art supplies. Salvos, Vinnies, and the local church-run shop in a regional town are full of embroidered tea towels, crocheted doilies, hand-knitted cardigans, and the occasional quilt with a small disaster in one corner. They sit on the racks at prices that range from a couple of dollars to a few, and they are pulled over by stylists, costume designers, and artists looking for material that already carries a life. There is a particular Australian aesthetic of the found and the repaired object, and it travels easily from a Friday afternoon in Newtown to a commercial gallery in Collingwood, or from a country op shop to a curated show at Carriageworks or the Ian Potter Centre.

This is the soil in which much local textile art has grown. The whitened crocheted blanket hanging in a Paddington gallery is rarely a clean abstraction. It is somebody's grandmother's labour, and the re-presentation of it inside a white cube opens a set of questions about whose hands, whose hours, and whose wages are made visible. Mawimbi's work takes these questions seriously, and her answer is not to hide the seam but to bring it forward, to give the viewer a chance to look at the join as the point of the work rather than as a flaw to be concealed. It does not argue with the inheritance. It does the mending.

Hand, machine, and the seam of intention

The choice between hand stitching and machine stitching is rarely just technical. Hand stitch is slow, irregular, and full of small errors that read as evidence of a body. Machine stitch is faster, more regular, and reads as the product of a system, even when the hand on the wheel is unmistakable. A zigzag made by an old Bernina on a kitchen table is a different mark from a satin stitch pulled by hand in the same kitchen. Both can be beautiful, and both carry information about the conditions of their making.

In Mawimbi's studio, the relationship between the two is a working argument rather than a settled position. Some pieces carry only the slow line, and the hours of sitting with the work are part of the meaning. Other pieces incorporate machine stitching for its rhythmic regularity, and the eye reads them differently. The argument is productive because it refuses the romantic idea that all handwork is virtuous and all machine work is cold. The question is not what tool made the line but what kind of attention the line asks, and whether the seam on display is an honest record of how the work came into being.

A stitch, in this sense, is a small document, and it records:

A contract for the seam

The gallery, like the loom, holds tension between warp and weft. The artist brings the work, the gallery brings the audience, and the contract between them decides who carries the cost of repair when the relationship frays. Anyone who has read a long-form artist-gallery agreement knows that the seam between representation and ownership is rarely drawn with the same care as the work itself. It is a place where ambiguities gather, and where misunderstandings are most expensive, especially for an emerging artist without the institutional trust to absorb a rough clause.

A useful recent account of the artist-gallery relationship, written from inside a working studio, can be read at the artist's contract with the gallery, and it makes the case that the contract is part of the work, not separate from it. The same ethics that govern a careful repair govern a careful agreement: honesty about the condition of the material, a willingness to record the join, and an understanding that the work will outlast the document. The seam, in this sense, is a kind of contract, and the contract is a kind of seam. To draw either with care is to think about the kind of future the line is being asked to hold.

If this thinking about line, thread, and repair resonates, the studio can be visited by appointment in Brisbane's inner south, and the current programme of work is documented across the site. To discuss a commission, a studio visit, or a possible exhibition, please get in touch through the contact page. The work continues, and the conversation about what it is, and how it should be held, is one the artist would rather have with a thoughtful reader than with a press release.