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Residency at Hillier Gardens
Hand stitched wood, cotton and cashmere.
As resident artist at Hillier Arboretum Vanessa worked with felled timber from the Hillier collection to make embroidered Linnaean labels for the scientific specimens, acting as transient memorials to the fallen trees.
The stitched works were documented as the threads bleached and unraveled in the elements. The works naturally decomposed but retained the traces of intervention; a series of holes like the burrowing of an insect or like the last bloom of lichen in the woodpile before the bark decomposed completely.