Embroidering with GPS
GPS Embroidery is an ongoing performance walking project that aims to broaden ideas about who-gets-to-write-what-where in and about the British landscape.
The title refers to the way the GPS signal to the satellites mirrors the to and fro of the embroidery needle, as both create their path across space. Embroidery is historically associated with women and domesticity, but “embroidering” with GPS subverts these traditional understandings, making a claim for self-expression outside the home and in public space, too.
This performance of stitching, writing or “invisible mending” slows down the process of working, drawing attention to shapes and their interrelationships, or to the peculiarity of English spelling. The landscape itself weaves its way into the outcome, and, in the interactions and imperfections that create these embroideries, new paths are worn, and worn-out phrases are rewritten.
Eventually we will create a multiplicity of 21st century embroideries, legacies to pass down like the domestically-produced examples from the past.
Home isn’t the only place that’s sweet.
What will you embroider?
The gendering of landscape – a 21st century approach
In 2016, as a way to query the politics implicitly justified by the phrase “as a mother”, I began to use this tool of imperial power as a response to inherited ideas which frequently frame the landscape as mother, but don’t leave much room for her as an individual within it. In contemporary politics, these understandings remain emotive (think of mother country, home office, domestic policy, and their recent (mis)uses). I embroidered quotations about nationhood by Romantic mothers in significant locations across the British landscape. You can see these here: https://www.gps-embroidery.com/brexit
Since then I have been running GPS embroidery workshops with girls, women and those with caring responsibilities in a variety of locations to address the spatial, political and environmental issues that affect us all. We talk and walk- with purpose but without direction- enjoying the conviviality of embroidering together. Participants have created their own stitches or chosen or composed texts and all have a connection to the place where we embroidered them.
Here is a series I did with mothers and carers: People Who Mother | GPS Embroidery
Here are embroideries that were part of an AHRC funded post-pandemic commission about environment and community: Acts of (In) visible Repair | GPS Embroidery
Current Project: On Cultivation
18th century Landscape gardens are said to be one of England’s greatest contributions to art.
They are also as gendered as the nude painting.
From paths to planting to perspectives, these are gardens for and about men. The viewpoints are designed to flatter the owner by making his property seem bigger than it is. The temples and statues reference his classical education, their arrangements make political statements or allude to the Grand Tour. Nature, gendered female, is shaped towards an imaginary ideal; rivers were dammed, earth was moved, and whole villages were shifted or sunk in order that the landowner could demonstrate his status, wealth and taste in the gardens he commissioned.
Space and time in these gardens were experienced differently for men and women. Statement trees like the Cedar of Lebanon were an investment in a future landscape, but only for male heirs. Meanwhile, women were encouraged to enjoy and replicate the details and shorter-term delights of annuals and perennials in flower gardens, which garden designers moved to the side of the house so as not to interrupt the grandeur of the view.
Muddying 18th century binaries of the sublime and beautiful, these embroideries are a contribution to wider conversations about how we acknowledge and interpret the legacies of the past, and how we query the ongoing conditioning that creates the human, too.
” I was surprised and so were others I spoke to about the depth of conversation which was generated in both workshops. You had to stop and pause from normal life. You had to take everything in and focus at a micro-level… It combined Art, Science, Technology and the Environment and fed the brain. That’s what people really enjoyed – they were challenged and had to use their brain – they were made to feel as if life was important beyond being a parent”. Lizzy Humber, Producer, Acts of Invisible Repair, Exeter. You can read the whole independent evaluation report here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ph5N-XaQ5Bxbi5dOY6mFo5x9tWqoippo/view?usp=sharing
You can read more about GPS Embroidery here:
Garcia, G, O’Malley, E, and Turner, C (2022) “Mundane” Performance: Theatre Outdoors and Earthly Pleasures, Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, The IATC journal/Revue de l’AICT – December/Décembre 2022: Issue No 26
Philps, E (2019) A global positioning system – On “finding myself”” in the Romantic Landscape,in K Johnson and J Johnston: Maternal geographies: mothering in and out of place, Bradford, Canada. Demeter Press.
Philps, E (2022) GPS Embroidery: walking as re-articulation of the written maternalised landscape, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, DOI: 10.1080/13569783.2022.2116975 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13