The book of change   
- telling my life story -

 

My personal story is the story of transforming a traumatic past with prolonged bullying. I am using text and textile to do this. 

As you can read at the page 'From pain to strength' this whole project started with just one feather which was distorted by a bead. This distorted feather acted like a metaphor for me, being distorted by the long term effects of being bullied.

I started healing myself by making long walks, collecting feathers and writing. The feathers I collected often reminded me of something that had happened to me in my past, especially the ones that were crushed, bloody and very much damaged. Sometimes I walked past some very damaged feathers, finding them just too ugly, but then after a while I went back to pick them up, because I felt that I needed also those ugly feathers, to help me heal my past. I washed them, petted them and wrote about it. Later these notes and some of the feathers I found became the base of my first two textile books in which I describe the way I dealt with my pain and feelings of inferiority, during primary school. At the end of the second book I have finished primary school.

 

Then, when the bullying stopped, there were still the wounds of it. 

So I knew that just remembering my past and writing about it would not be enough to heal myself. I had to dig deeper, to find out how much the bullying had changed me. I discovered several animal characteristics within myself, for instance a chameleon and a terrier! Again I wrote about this, which resulted in a second series of textile books.

 

When this was ready, I felt it was time to take the next step - transforming these animal qualities in such a way that they could serve me instead of bother me.

Finally this resulted in a series of embroidered animal portraits.

I decided to use a folding screen for the display of these animal portraits.

 

Now all this is ready, I hope that it will be possible to publish this whole process in a book.