v. 539
This fifth piece in the Dark Hedges collection shares a story of forgiveness on the journey to freedom - a layer below the surface of everything that took shape in the past. "539" begins with the same woven structure as "I Wish I Had Been Braver" and gently relinquishes this structure, fading into a pattern that celebrates freedom and transition, a pattern that's about a journey of captured joy.
The 5,000,000 stitches of cashmere, linen and silk are broken up into flowing repeats, multiples of 7, 77 and 539, with two contrasting disruptions breaking the journey to acknowledge the cost of answering the question of what it means to forgive, drawing from the Biblical story where Jesus teaches his disciples to keep forgiving one another. After each interruption, the pattern gives way again to the continuous flow of green, intentionally using the same palette as 'Eponym', but representing instead the spiritual journey of 'Dark Hedges' rather than the physical one.
The flow of interlaced thread hits an interruption like a tollbooth on a motorway, and yet the new pattern that I developed, specifically to tell the story of forgiveness in this scarf, continues as if the interruption never happened. Here, as we come to the end of this scarf, we return once more to where we started, the structural composition of order and beauty that differentiates stories by colour in the first three scarves of 'Dark Hedges'. We'll wonder whether it's perception or reality that has changed, and we'll find that it's both.