The advantage of painting and embroidering – unless we are commissioned to produce a faithful reproduction of a particular reality – is that we can condense a long stretch of life into a single piece. I confess I didn’t do it for philosophical reasons, but simply for the sake of shapes, textures and colours: the white berries to be used as filler, glossy and prominent, accompanied by the wild, twisted bare twigs, seemed to me the perfect finishing touch. After a bit of searching online, I discovered that the most similar were the berries of the white holly, which obviously ripen just before Christmas. I had received the news with a touch of disappointment, embarrassment at my boundless ignorance and the terrible realisation that I would have to start all over again, followed by a strong sense of nausea. Yes, I’m exaggerating, but after a month of failures, even my body was feeling the strain…

But then I decided to cast common sense aside. Or rather… to cast aside this conditioned mindset of mine, which demands that everything be meticulously catalogued, sorted into little bags, dated and filed away in an archive, the order of which is dictated by the circumstances of the moment. At nearly fifty, I need to realise that this isn’t why we embroider. There is that ‘poetic criterion’ that has been whirling round in my head ever since I mentioned it in a post a while back. And finally, the revelation: what action is more liberating than gathering the elements of our lived experience, mixing them up—even haphazardly—and letting them give life to new worlds, whose evocations speak to us through memories, granting us a broader temporal perspective than that of the present moment? So this bouquet tells me of spring and its colours, of summer’s exuberance, of autumn’s fascinating withering, and of winter’s botanical miracles. And it does so through the faded colours of memory, within which each of us reads our own.