The Covid Quilts: Part 2

We all know that the last 6 months have been tough.  I am married to a front line NHS worker so we had been following the growth of this illness for some time.  It was clear that things were going to be bad from mid February.  I had read stories of what was happening in the hospitals of Northern Italy and could see it was only a matter of time before it was over here.  Nicky was battling with getting decent PPE and the right to wear it on wards with coughing patients still waiting for a diagnosis taking days to come through.

I was still teaching at Hereford College of Arts.  The last day before lockdown, as I walked to the station I overheard two students behind me talking; they talked about how they wouldn’t mind getting ‘IT’ because they could do with ‘a bit of a skive’.  I was so angry I couldn’t turn to look at them.  They were young and naïve but I thought of the older people in their lives and how they might be affected by the illness.

Nicky led from the front and was one of the first of her team to dress up like an astronaut and go onto ITU. She works in cardiology and Covid does horrible things to your heart; echocardiograms were in high demand.  The first time she went up there she said it was like a war zone; she was clearly shaken; she stopped talking about what was going on during the 12 hour shifts day and night.

I was at home feeling fairly helpless.  I am zooming away to my students from Hereford trying to keep them positive and working, but in comparison to what Nicky was doing it felt very small. 

I am a quilter; that’s what I do.  So I decided to quilt and this piece is the result.

I started with a simple ‘Stay Safe’ and then another for my sister, but I knew that I wanted to make a bigger more considered piece.

It says what I wanted to say to those two young people.

 

 

Hand-Made Embroidered Electromyography

Some of you will know that I have had a long standing relationship with CoRE, Centre for Robotics Research at Kings College London.  Last year I was involved in an EPSRC GCRF project to investigate the potential of hand sewn e-textile muscle sensors as a reusable and lower cost alternative to mass produced sensors.

I am very pleased to announce that thanks to Samuel Pitou and Matthew Howard’s hard work, a paper on this project has just been published in the MDPI Journal Sensors.  You can read about it here https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/20/12/3347

I ran a series of workshops with the women’s group Shelanu in Birmingham and at the Science Gallery in London to help  test this hypothesis.  Participants were asked to sew and test a given number of sensors and these were then laboratory tested later.

So this is the technical jargon bit…..When you move a muscle in your body electrical impulses, electromyopthy, can be measured on the surface of the skin (sEMG).  This research project was to compare the results for hand embroidered sEMGs alongside machine stitched and mass produced single use stick on sensors.  The rationale was that because they are on a fabric substrate there is potential for laundering and therefore re-use which may be a cheaper and more sustainable.   Because a hand sewn sensor does not need expensive equipment and relies on straight forward sewing techniques there is also the potential for them to be made by Community Interest Companies (CIC) within the populations of the low income countries where they might be used.

Want to know what the point is?  This short film shows embroidered sEMGs picking up electrical impulses on the skin to drive a robotic limb

The Covid Quilts: Part 1

The first half of the year has been an unusual one for us all.   When lockdown finally happened I had already witnessed my partner, Nicky,  trying to plan for the oncoming storm for at least 4 weeks; I had read the stories of the overwhelmed hospitals in Northern Italy; my brother was locked down in Southern Spain; it was clear it was going to be bad.

 

Many of you will know that Nicky works in Cardiology and specifically Echocardiology (ultrasounds of the heart).  The procedure is a 40 minute, intimate scan that is on a par to cuddling the patient.  In the run up to lockdown she told tales of scanning coughing patients dressed only in a plastic apron and gloves because although they were symptomatic they were undiagnosed because the test results were taking 6 days to come back; at that point the hospital would not let staff wear masks unless there was a confirmed diagnosis.  The guidelines on PPE kept changing and it was a constant battle for her and her team.  She was fitted for the special masks that were for use on the Intensive Treatment Unit (ITU) and began to talk about 12 hour shifts working around the clock.  The hospital was adding extra beds to ITU and converting operating theatres to additional ITU wards; work started on the Nightingale Hospital at the NEC.  I know it was tough on her kitting up (they call it donning and doffing) and going onto the wards dressed in the full gear; she stopped talking about what she saw.

And what was I doing?  I was working from home (and then furloughed) for the sewing machine distributors of Pfaff and Husqvarna Viking that I provide technical support for.  My three days a week at Hereford College of Art went onto zoom tutorials and seminars trying to reassure students that it was all going to be okay.  Whilst this was really important, it was not the life and death experience that Nicky was going through. 

It was scary.  I felt impotent.

I am a quilter; so I made a quilt

I found myself chanting the message ‘Stay Safe’ whenever she or I went out.  On the back of the earlier Recovery Quilts it seemed a logical step to make a Covid Quilt saying that.  I wanted to sew something that was as positive and joyous as possible and hang it in as public a place.

The first quilt was made very quickly and I taped it into the front window so people walking past could see it.  Technically its unfinished as its still a quilt top only.  I will admit that it was actually sellotaped in place.  The second, more considered version is quilted and hangs in my sister’s front window on the busy street in Hove she lives on.  Annoyingly her quilt is much better than mine.

Flying across an embroidery

Back in 2016 I worked on a commission for the Royal Shakespeare Company.  As part of the events to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death the RSC asked artists to make work in response to cast and creative’s favourite quotes.  I worked with composer Isobel Waller-Bridge’s choice of Caliban’s speech from ‘The Tempest’.  I focussed on two elements of the speech; firstly the part where Caliban likens noises on the island to ‘a thousand twangling instruments’ and secondly the part where Caliban speaks of dreaming and clouds.
The video above is a rendering film showing the digitisation of the embroidery.

http://www.isobelwaller-bridge.com/

 Here are two of the finished pieces

Singing Quilts:All the things you are not yet

My Singing Quilt, ‘All the things you are not yet’ features a mobile phone photograph of two pre-implantation embryos digitally printed onto cotton.  This fabric has been embroidered with conductive threads to make fabric speakers that play a sound file of those embryos, now 5 years old boys, singing ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.’  The soft circuits have been designed that the sound file is triggered when the quilt is touched.  Because the speakers are made from fabric the sound has a faint, ghost like quality and you need to put your head near the quilt to hear it.  This means the experience for the viewer is both interactive and intimate.

This was made with the help of the Centre for Robotics Research, Kings College London.