Carrying Home

Alia works with aprons. The aprons are stitched, embroidered, layered with patchwork built up over time, each one functioning as a kind of textile diary of motherhood, dense with the small repeated gestures of care. Onto and around the aprons, her young son Alfie has drawn freely, his scribbles spontaneous and immediate against the slow, deliberate work of her sewing. The two registers, the patient stitch and the quick mark, share the same surface without resolving into one image. Alia does not edit the scribbles out. She lets both hands stay visible. The work makes visible the ordinarily invisible labour of mothering, the seam constantly being made and unmade, the household always being held together by someone whose work is rarely seen as work at all. The apron, usually the costume of unnoticed labour, becomes the canvas where that labour is finally legible.