Stitching on red fabric
The red robe was originally part of a fancy dress costume for Little Red Riding Hood, and the repeatedly stitched phrase, Do you understand yet?, is inspired by a sequence from the Völuspá, in the Poetic Edda.
The Völuspá is the best know poem of the Poetic Edda, one of the most important primary sources for the study of Norse mythology. It tells the story of creation of the world and its coming end and subsequent rebirth from the ashes of death and destruction, related to the audience by a völva, or seeress, addressing Odin.
In the poem, the seeress recounts to Odin that she knows some of his own secrets, and that he sacrificed an eye in pursuit of knowledge. She tells him she knows where his eye is hidden and how he gave it up in exchange for knowledge. When speaking, she asks him in several refrains if he understands, or if he would like to hear more.
The red robe is an instantly recognised object, and the story of the girl in the robe and the wolf who wants to eat her, is one of the most well-known fairy tales, in the Western world at least. For me, it is a story about childhood innocence and growing up, and the monsters we face along the way.
As I stitched the phrase Do you understand yet? over and over in rows on the robe, it became almost like an incantation or spell. Stitching it took many, many hours, and by the end I was hoping to have understood something profound, or at least have some clarity. What started as a piece of repetitive slow stitching inspired by a myth about prophesies, fate, and the end of the world, ended up as a piece on healing the inner child, and childhood trauma.