‘Ceremonial Garment for Healing’

Kate Howe, 2023, Sutured Belgian Linen Cloak (WIP). Hands: Sylvia Flateau. Collection: The Polemics of Pulling.

“Jesus Christ it’s hard to write about this shit. It’s a garment. I put it on her, and I sewed it with my two hands, burying within it the image of my unstable self, by inflating and deflating my animated and empty corpse rattling across the barren wasteland of time, assembling itself. Healing. Seeing, separating mind from media, wedging a crowbar in the back door of the Truman Show of my life, my Instagram plugged into a mind younger and number than mine, a native user, holding the line back every day. I wrap her in it, in the sutured skin, in the bringing together, the relentless, relentless willingness to trust, to hurt, to learn, to take another step. It's true, I’m relentless. It's true. I’ve seen the fucking dark, my friend. What are you going to do? What the fuck else is there to do? There is the work. Painting saved me. Painting is real. Painting transcends everything and doesn’t matter at all. I wrap her young self in it like a cocoon, a carapace of sutured knowledge, my grandmother’s toxic love lace through the now swollen knuckles of my mother. And on and on to me, each of these instructions mingles in a healing net of pulling, becoming, being and defining. We look at each other in this island of light, this ridiculous clubhouse, and, under the shaft of wintery English sky, shot through the leaky skylight, she glows, regal, still, enveloped. Something shifts. Something transcends beauty and comes into accord with healing. I pull the collar over, exposing the hanging strings of each painful stitch. Every knot a hard-won tie-off. Still standing. There she is. We have more to teach than how to transmit pain. The cloth closes around her and says it is a Garment of Healing, and this is a ceremony.”

-Kate Howe on ‘Ceremonial Garment…"‘