Stay Stitch
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| I should tell you about the burlap first, because the burlap is the patient. Twelve years at the Museum of International Folk Art, I mended other people's textiles — Navajo blankets, colonial embroidery, ceremonial cloth. Every piece that came across my table was already falling apart when it arrived. That's why they called me. And every time I opened a new folder and saw the damage, my first question was never "how do I fix this." It was always: "how much of this can I leave alone." Because over-repair is worse than no repair. A mender who doesn't know when to stop is not saving the object — she's replacing it with something that looks like the object but isn't. The best repair is the one the fabric doesn't need to apologize for. This painting is three repairs on burlap. Not three decorations. Three repairs. Each black line is a sashiko run — multiple parallel stitches moving together across the surface, turning where the damage turns, stopping where the damage stops. You can see the individual threads in each band because that's how sashiko works: the needle goes in, the needle comes out, the fabric breathes between each stitch. The white gaps between the black bands are the burlap showing through, the same way the original fabric shows through the stitching on a mended blanket. I didn't paint those gaps. I painted the stitches. The gaps are the fabric's own voice, saying: I'm still here underneath. The three lines don't connect. This is important. In traditional sashiko, the pattern is continuous — one thread, one path, the repair travels across the whole surface without breaking. But I'm not mending a blanket anymore. I'm mending a surface that has three separate wounds, and each wound needs its own attention. The top line turns left, then right — it's following a fracture that changes direction, the way a crack in old pottery will suddenly veer because it hit a pocket of air in the clay. The left line goes horizontal, then drops straight down — that's a clean break, two edges pulling apart at a right angle, the easiest kind of damage to understand and the hardest kind to forgive. The bottom-right line mirrors it from the other side, like the fabric is being pulled in two directions at once and each side is calling for its own row of stitches. The gap between the top line and the left line — the one that looks like a frame without a picture — is the wound I didn't stitch. Not because I forgot. Because some gaps don't need closing. A textile conservator knows this: sometimes the hole in the fabric is the most honest part of the object. It's where the thread gave out, where the moths found their way in, where the light came through the weave for the first time. Mending that hole would be erasing the evidence that the fabric lived a life before I touched it. I stay-stitched around the wound. I stabilized the edges so the fabric won't unravel further. And then I stopped. Stopping is the hardest part of repair. Anybody can keep stitching. Knowing when the fabric has had enough — that takes years. The green traces — those aren't mine. That's Tomás. His hands were on this surface after mine, the way they always are, and his contribution is the one you almost miss: a faint celadon residue, like copper oxide flashing green in a reduction kiln, where the glaze reacts to the atmosphere and gives you a color you didn't ask for and can't repeat. He didn't paint the green. It deposited itself — the way kiln ash settles on a pot that's been in the fire too long. His whisper is quieter here than in our other works. On some canvases, Tomás cracks my surface open and the whole painting shifts under his weight. Here, he just brushed past. A light touch. The way you'd test a wound to see if it's still tender. It is. It should be. That's how you know the repair was honest and not just cosmetic. I called this Stay Stitch because that's what the three lines are: stitches that hold the fabric in place so it doesn't distort any further. They're not decorative. They're not the main event. They're the quiet, functional, absolutely necessary work of keeping something from getting worse while you decide whether it needs to get better. I've been doing this work my whole adult life. I still don't know the difference between "worse" and "better" most days. But I know the difference between stitching and over-stitching. And I know that the gap I left — the empty frame in the middle of all that black — is the most important part of this painting. Not because of what's there. Because of what I chose to leave alone. |
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About Artist
Paint doing what I try to make clay do. Build up. Hold weight. Cast shadow
Tomás Vargas spent a decade making functional pottery — bowls, cups, vessels — in his garage, selling to Santa Fe galleries and using the rejects at home. He never chased control over his glazes; the kiln decided. Crackle, crawl, ash deposit — what potters call "faults," Tomás called the work.
They are married. They share a converted-garage studio. And since 2023, they share every canvas. Elena lays the ground — a rhythm of short parallel strokes like sashiko mending, terracotta dust and faded indigo, patches where the canvas breathes through. Tomás presses in — broad strokes of iron oxide and ash white dragged with full arm weight, cracking where the paint dries too fast, collapsing at the edges to reveal Elena's repair marks beneath. She builds the wound. He opens it wider. The painting is what's left.
Two makers. One canvas. No compromise.
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