Robert Oppenheimer's Doily

Robert Oppenheimer's Doily (2022) Hand embroidery, cotton on vintage linen. 23"(h) 31"(w)

Little did I know when I made this piece that a blockbuster movie would be coming out the next year. It was July 2022, and on the 16th I read an article about it being the 77th anniversary of the Trinity test of the atomic bomb. I had a quote from Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the team that developed the bomb, that had been kicking around for a while, and I decided that now was the time to use it. 

The words themselves preceded Oppenheimer's more famous quote from the Bhavagad Vita "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds". Less dramatic, but more chilling. The near-banality of his words echoed the underlying raison d'etre of my series of embroidered quotes on domestic linens. In considering the lives of the various famous people whose words I use, I try to position them as fellow human beings with homes, people that eat and bathe and value the comforts of  a well-managed household. As I give the anonymous linens, into which an equally anonymous maker (usually a woman) poured her skill and creative energy, a new life, so is the role of the significant person whose words I embroider (with equal dedication) reconsidered. I think of these pieces as evocative of old-fashioned samplers, on which young girls would show off their sewing skills with prescriptive quotes on proper conduct, usually from the Bible. My own work gives, I hope, a different perspective on how we live, and the guiding principles that instruct us. The words are serious, perhaps even horrific, but I hope to seduce with the familiarity and gentility of household linen.

Robert Oppenheimer's Doily (2022) detail

People often comment on how "perfect" my embroidery is, sometimes suggesting that I could do it on a machine to save time! Time, in fact, is something essential to my work. The many hours of careful, quiet stitching are evidence of the serious care and regard I extend to my work, and how I honour the skill and perseverance of the anonymous stitchers whose cloth I work into.

Robert Oppenheimer's Doily (2022), work in progress

I admit, I have a little trick that helps create the illusion of perfection. I don't start with the first word and stitch in sequential order through to the last. I work all over, randomly, so that the days when my hand is less steady, or my eyes less acute, don't obviously show. 

Robert Oppenheimer's Doily (2022) detail

Another trick I have, which is more fiddly, but to me, makes the stitches richer, is to mix the colours of the threads. Here, I use three strands of DMC embroidery floss, each a different shade of red. I was aiming to match the colours of the flames that a survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima depicted in a painting of her experience that day. This painting was in a book that I purchased at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, when I visited there in 2008. The impact of the exhibits of the museum was so intense that I avoided looking at the book until last year, searching for the right colour of thread to use.

I finished stitching the piece on August 6th, 2022. The time period it took for me to complete the piece was the same as the interval between the testing of the bomb (and the occasion for Oppenheimer's words) and the detonation of the bomb over Hiroshima, killing between 70,000–126,000 civilians, 7,000–20,000 soldiers and 12 Allied prisoners of war.