-
Date Created
-
2024
-
Contributor
-
O'Farrell, Maggie
-
Description
-
My project features two hands, and it symbolizes the connection between Agnes and her son. Inspired by a drawing I created while reading the book, the design explores the themes of connection, loss, and transcendence that Maggie O’Farrell weaves throughout the novel. The hands reflect the bond that forms between mother and child and is a key element of Agnes’s journey as she grapples with the feelings that are upon her in the aftermath of the death of her son. While stitching the project together, I found myself thinking about how readers resonate with the themes of grief and resilience. Creating this artwork, I was able to look deeper into the meaning of loss, and it showed me how it manifests differently for everyone and still remains universally impactful. Transforming this interpretation into an artistic piece helped enrich the themes and emotions to me when it comes to the human experience.
MACKENZIE LARKIN ON WHAT THIS CRAFTED OBJECT TEACHES US:
Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet richly explores themes of grief, love, connection and creativity. O’Farrell looks at the impacts of the devastation that comes with the loss of a child and how the family navigates the effects and the aftermath of this profound grief. Protagonist Agnes’s love for her children and her husband is explored, and it is obvious the sacrifices that she makes for their happiness and survival. The theme of family dynamics is a central part of O’Farrell’s novel, and it is these dynamics that highlight how individuals shape their relationships and the legacies that can be inherited. Another key theme of Hamnet is the connection between human life and the natural world; Agnes is an example of this when she finds the rhythms of nature and finds the interconnectedness of all living things. One could further consider themes in the novel’s portrayal of the plague, which acts as both a personal tragedy and the reminder that life has a fragility to it, and each individual experiences it differently. This novel examines the essence of storytelling and the means it provides to preserve one’s memory in an attempt to transcend mortality and death. Embroidery in relation to Maggie O’Farrell’s novel can be seen as a powerful symbol that intertwines themes of memory and grief. Through the character creation of Agnes throughout the book, readers can start to form an understanding as to how embroidery may help O’Farrell in representing the traditional role of domestic crafts and the ideas of care, expression, and resistance.
Agnes is a natural healer and has a very profound connection with the natural world. Her intuitive understanding of people helps her channel her own emotions, which can be linked to the emotions that can be portrayed by embroidery projects. With every stitch, there is a symbolized connection to Agnes’s desire to weave together her life fragments and bring together her life, memories, and relationships each holding their own significance. Embroidery also helps to mirror the novel’s exploration of the fragile connections between Agnes’s past and present and the ideas of life and death. The connection between embroidery and the death of Hamnet can be seen as a way for her to process the grief she is struggling with. The repetitive, meditative nature of stitching reflects Agnes’s attempts to create order within the chaos that is her mourning in a tactile way that allows her to hold onto what she has lost, “Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns.” (O’Farrell, 8). Creating something through embroidery parallels the novel’s narrative, helps create a way of preserving memory, and transforms the pain felt by tragedy into something that can be admired by others. Just as O’Farrell investigates the dynamics of creation and legacy, embroidery represents the different but equally profound forms of artistry created by people. Using embroidery as a motif resonates with Hamnet and emphasizes the interconnectedness of life and the way that love and loss can be woven seamlessly into the human experience, as the narrator observes: “She grows up, too, with the memory of what it meant to be properly loved, for what you are, not what you ought to be” (O’Farrell, 58). O’Farrell highlights the enduring power of creativity as is an act of remembrance and as a way to mend the fractured pieces of the heart.
Throughout the process of creating my embroidery project, I had to learn patience and the importance of both creativity and the feeling of satisfaction from creating something by hand. Although embroidery can appear quite simple, I quickly realized that it is a very intricate art form requiring focus and care. I was taught that each stitch has to be made with intention and that you have to learn that accepting imperfection gets the job done. As I worked through my project, something else I learned was that it is actually important to slow down and appreciate the process rather than rushing through it just to get it done because when you rush, you are more likely to make mistakes and miss the meaning behind the design you create. Selecting colours and patterns helped me engage with the creativity that I thought I had lost in the most unexpected ways and helped reteach me that even when I think the smallest details don’t matter, they actually make all the difference to cohesion. The process reminded me that art is just as much about discipline as it is about inspiration and that looking beyond technical skills offers feelings that are meditative and calming. The rhythm that comes from stitching provides a sense of calm and focus and offers a welcome escape from the chaos of everyday life. I think my biggest lesson is that it is important to value even the smallest imperfections in my work, no matter how frustrating they are. The reason for this is that accepting the imperfections is evidence of effort and growth rather than a flaw. Overall, I think that choosing to work on this embroidery project helped me to find a new hobby that taught me not only technical skills but also helped nurture my creativity and offered me a personal insight that I hope to hold onto for the future.
Spending the last couple of weeks working on the embroidery project helped to enrich the initial interpretation I had of Hamnet. It allowed me to find a connection between embroidery and the novel’s themes of memory, grief, and creativity on a more personal and tactile level. When I first engaged with embroidery in class, it held my interest and attention, and then getting to do it again for my final project as well as in my personal time offered me several different outlooks on Agnes and her quiet strength and resilience. Threading each colour of string through the needle and stitching together the embroidery pattern brought the novel’s exploration of loss and people’s processing of loss to the forefront and inspired me to look at how loss can influence finding meaning in creation. Each stitch is a symbol of the threads that bind individuals to one another, which looks at how interconnected relationships especially inside the pages of the novel are and how the bond between Agnes and her child, in particular her son has remained preserved. Just as Agnes preserves the memory of her son and channels her grief, embroidery becomes a metaphor for life’s fragility as well as its inherent beauty. As the narrator notes, her son’s memory and her grief “will lie at her very core, for the rest of her life” (O’Farrell, 9). The imperfections of the stitching mirror the imperfections of love in the novel; this parallel reminded me of how O’Farrell integrates ideas of strength and vulnerability in her characters. My own project allowed me to understand that O’Farrell was telling a story about enduring love, memory, and creativity and that stitching together the fragments of my embroidery project created a connection to Agnes trying to stitch back together the broken fragments of her life after her son's life ended.
-
References
-
O'Farrell, Maggie. Hamnet: A Novel. Knopf Canada. Kindle Edition.