Artist Celia Pym explores the emotional durability of clothing – the stories we carry in the garments we love, and how repair can be a transformative act of care and connection.
As part of TOAST Circle, we are offering everyone who donates their previously loved TOAST pieces to our New York shops before Tue 21 October the chance to win a unique repair experience in New York with TOAST and Celia Pym.
One winner will have the opportunity to bring their own cherished knitwear item for Celia to mend. Together, you’ll discuss the item and explore ideas of repair and care, visit BLUE, The TATTER Textile Library, renowned for its ever-growing collection of books, journals and objects, and enjoy a late lunch at Rhodora Wine Bar, the first zero-waste wine bar of its kind in the country.
Below, UK winner Emily Gowers reflects on a day spent with the repair artist in London.
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We all have old clothes we can’t quite bring ourselves to throw away. For me, they include my going away dress; a pashmina – now moth-eaten – that a dear friend gave me; the dressing gown I wore in hospital when I had my babies; those babies’ tiny garments; and my own baby clothes, which I don’t even remember wearing. Getting rid of damaged or outgrown clothes feels like a rejection of the people or experience with which they’re associated; keeping them creates an album of memories to sift through years later.
Repair, on the other hand, is a testament to patience, forgiveness, second and third chances, and connection. Generations of young women were once trained to make mending look invisible. A friend’s grandmother’s winter task at finishing school in Germany was to cut the heel off a sock and repair it to look good as new. There are videos online of perfect darning, and they are mesmerising. But what if you were to make the repair conspicuous instead? The beauty in imperfection would be something to celebrate.
Celia Pym is a modern master of visible mending, which she has elevated to an art form. Trained as a sculptor and textile artist, she has always been closely aligned with TOAST and its mission to cherish everything slow, inherited and long-lasting. The sweaters and cardigans she joyfully salvages conjure up the lives of their absent owners. Last December, the walls of the NOW Gallery in north Greenwich were covered with multi-coloured socks patched by primary school children with thick needles for Celia’s exhibition Socks: The Art of Care and Repair. My daughter and I had a go at darning, too. One of my best Christmas presents was Celia’s book, On Mending. It tells tender stories of loss, grief and repair, in which the humans are often just as worn as their clothes.
In late August, as the lucky winner of the TOAST Circle prize draw (I donated previously-loved clothes for reuse via the lovely women at the Cambridge shop), I had the chance to visit Celia’s London studio and archive. With me were TOAST Communications Manager Madeleine Michell and photographer Aloha Bonser-Shaw. Celia reflected on how the pandemic brought us all closer to our domestic surroundings: one day, when she accidentally split a bag of potatoes, her first instinct was to mend it. She has since darned and patched a series of paper bags, the most fragile and ephemeral of everyday objects, and made them into works of art. “The trouble with paper,” she says, “is that you can’t take back the hole once you’ve made it.” Wool, meanwhile, is “friendly”; its fibres spring, stretch and cling to each other. Moths, the enemies of wool, she generously counts as collaborators. After all, they provide the holes for her to mend. “I love the way they chew – unevenly,” she laughs.
In a corner of Celia’s studio is an old family chair whose seat and arms are patched in blue cotton. Celia spots an area of wear that will need attention soon. “Mending,” she says, “is never finished.” She once trained as a nurse, which taught her how to “feel” a patient’s symptoms through sight and touch. You can sense the care with which she handles burned or tattered fibres as if they spoke of emotional as well as physical damage. When she repairs a hole, she “goes wide” around it with her stitching, to set a secure base. She says it’s like sticking a plaster well beyond the edges of a cut, “so that healing can happen underneath”. But mending puts strain on damaged fibres, so that the graft doesn’t always take and may eventually need restoring.
My favourite TOAST sweater is about to receive Celia’s attention. It’s the third incarnation I’ve had of the Wool Cashmere Neat Sweater in a russet-red colour, but so ravaged by moths that I use it only for running in. We spend time choosing mohair threads to make it glow again: bright green, dark blue and splashes of unexpected turquoise. Afterwards, we have lunch at Silo, London’s first zero-waste restaurant, where vegetable peelings and juices are embraced with as much love as Celia’s hole-ridden socks and jumpers.
Celia Pym has struck a chord with a new generation of artful crafters, who are attracted to the combination of creativity, sustainability and mental soothing that thoughtful mending offers. Several TOAST shops have in-house repair specialists, stitching quietly away or with the garments’ owners sitting alongside them. During our time together, Celia expressed this as sometimes a three-way therapy: for the menders, the owner (or their survivors) and the garment itself. It’s about teaching the hands to relax; when knitters or spinners tense up, the thread becomes tighter, too.
Needlework still feels like the most useful skill I learned at my academic-focused school. To this day, I enjoy hand-sewing curtains and making cushions from old textiles. It's an even more restorative activity than my daily sudoku, which, come to think of it, is just another form of patching. A Princeton professor I know once walked into a seminar room to find two of her younger female colleagues knitting. “Whatever happened to the revolution?” she cried. Well, a new revolution is here, and it’s wild, woolly and waste-free.
Words by Emily Gowers.
Photography by Aloha Bonser-Shaw.
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