A Stitch for Every Sound [National Exhibition Centre]

A Stitch for Every Sound is an ongoing collaborative project developed with sound artist and musician Gavin Osborn that explores the relationship between listening, embroidery, and place. Through a process of exchange, sound recordings become embroidered compositions, while the act of stitching itself becomes a source of sound, generating an evolving dialogue between textile and sonic practices.

The project began in 2022 through a series of site-responsive investigations at the National Exhibition Centre, Birmingham. Working within the spaces between exhibitions, Osborn recorded overlooked and transient sounds: the resonance of architectural structures, the movement of air, fragments of electromagnetic activity, and the delicate impact of a falling leaf against a lamp post. Once isolated and amplified, these seemingly insignificant moments revealed unexpected musicality and complexity.

Using attentive listening as a method, I translated selected sounds into hand-stitched forms. Repeated marks, densities, rhythms, and accumulations of thread became a means of recording sonic experience through the tactile language of embroidery. Simultaneously, Osborn captured the subtle soundscape of stitch itself, using highly sensitive microphones to reveal the acoustic textures embedded within the process of making.

The resulting works occupy a space between score, drawing, textile, and sound composition. Neither direct transcription nor illustration, the embroideries become material traces of listening—records of duration, attention, and encounter. Through the interplay of sound recordings, stitched surfaces, photographs, and collected fragments, the project asks how textile processes might expand our understanding of place, and how listening can function as a form of embodied knowledge.

Presented across multiple contexts, including Festival of Quilts, Chelsea Space, and subsequent exhibitions, A Stitch for Every Sound continues to investigate the creative potential of moving between auditory and tactile forms of perception. The work proposes stitch not simply as a method of representation, but as a means of listening differently to the world.