Last Saturday Young Blood Gallery & Boutique hosted a public sewing circle as part of Jes Schrom’s Secrets of Atlanta project. Jes provided a basket full of vintage handkerchiefs with hand-written transcriptions of secrets collected in specially-made ballot boxes around Atlanta. Participants both new to and familiar with embroidery spent the afternoon threading needles, practicing the back stitch, and chatting around the circle. The slow process allowed us time to consider each secret we sewed, marking out a private space, an individual action, in a public location.
Jes and her assistant spent the summer typing the secrets (over 700 of them) onto tri-fold paper towels. These paper secrets will be installed in restroom towel dispensers at Octane Coffee (Westside) and Aurora Coffee (Virginia Highlands), among others. The stitched secrets from Saturday will appear in an exhibition in Louisiana and hopefully one in Atlanta.
To learn more about Jes’s work, visit her website. View other Flux Projects here.
evocations and illuminations 