I am determined to retain my identity as a creative, despite living with the collective pull of symptoms trying to draw me towards disengagement, entropy and erosion.
Below the Surface
You have become a wizard at waiting.
In chronic illness, tomorrow is so unreliable.
Mild weather comes when it will, stays briefly,
transient as rain showers, mutable as clouds.
At times of great affliction your body
burrows into sleep or waits, exhausted.
Over and again, life interrupted
by crippling symptoms feels like erasure.
On your best days, making space for art is
the most awake and vital you can be.
The hours when your hands stop shaking, fingers
flex, that sweet spot when the pills work, pain ebbs.
Sorting your silks, playing as a child would
with their colours, winding skeins or stitching.
You are Lachesis measuring threads,
sister Atropos waiting with her scissors.
Your wild imagination hosts many lives.
You are the creatrix of worlds in cloth
and fibres, poetics of illness, light
universes framed by a camera lens.
Your ritual for making space is intent,
undistracted time with work in process.
But before your mind tires, your body’s spent.
Patient as a gardener, you wait. Again.
You’ve hoarded stories as seeds, stored images
like cuttings from exotic plants, survived
your inner climate’s storms, anticipating
these growing seasons, measured in hours.
Then images bloom slowly from stitches,
your pen unfurls poems. Hardships are banished
below the surface, between lines: backcloths
and final prints hide messy knots and drafts.
Every creation proof of your existence.
At times, I wanted to give up. But I didn’t, because sometimes, on good days (or hours), in the flow of creating, even pain disappears.
Below the Surface
the poetics of sickness; photography; slow stitch
I am determined to retain my identity as a creative, despite living with the collective pull of symptoms trying to draw me towards disengagement, entropy and erosion. I have even recently adopted another creative form, mixed media textile art, which complements my lifelong practices of poetry and photography:
I know stitching is a counter-intuitive choice, given my reduced fine motor skills, caused by Parkinson’s tremors, osteo-arthritis and peripheral neuropathy (though I’m told it is excellent physical therapy for my stiff fingers). But in other ways, sewing is a practical choice, as I can do it sitting down, since I can no longer stand for any length of time as I did when researching and writing landscape, and teaching community art. And when I sew in the company of other women, it is wonderfully social. I love multi-media’s sense of play, a return to childhood when I learned to embroider. The silk or wool threads I use are colourful and textured. I hand-paint silk or paper with fabric dye for backgrounds. Op shops and craft shops offer cornucopias of trimmings and ornaments with which to create 3D effects. I give my own stash of sewing scraps a second life as applique and collage.
When I consider the many stories, across cultures, of women working with textiles who wielded the power of self-determination against great challenges – Athena, Arachne, Penelope, Ariadne, Elise in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Wild Swans, the miller’s daughter in Rumplestiltskin – it’s no wonder that stiff fingers and having to improvise with threading aids and tweezers could not deter me.
Besides, I am an old fighter at a new frontier: a 1970s feminist, now confronting my disabilities with the same passion, patience and persistence with which I won my independence, the hard way, as a young wife and mother in Malta. There, to become a published journalist and poet, I had to overcome the opposition of a small-island catholic curia which wanted wives to stay at home, preferably silent, and some of my family who agreed with that. Happily, times have changed attitudes for the better now. And yet, I am aware and saddened that not everyone with a disability has the support to live their best life.
I’ve found that support through belonging to the Sick AF collective. Our collective does more than mount exhibitions; from the moment of a show’s conception, we are supportive of our individual practices by engaging online, with each other and with our inspirational curator. Amanda Alderson is an artist in her own right and a highly experienced curator – who continues with her practices, despite disabling chronic ill health. Sick AF is life-changing.
Through this engagement with each other and participation in online forums, I know that most of the work that anyone with a chronic illness must to do, on a daily basis, to survive and thrive, is invisible. It happens below the surface. So I have chosen the title Below the Surface for my textile piece in this exhibition, “Making Space”, at the Mundaring Art Centre.
I want my poem, hung alongside my textile, together with my photographs and descriptive labels, to give you a glimpse inside my creative process. Inevitably, the end result is not perfection. In drawing your attention to the unevenness in my stitched work, which took me fourteen months to complete, I acknowledge the changing conditions and phases of dynamic disabilities. Also, to show work which does not let perfection be the enemy of the good.
The stitching, which changes in different sections, shows how the severity of symptoms in Parkinson’s, Fibromyalgia, Bronchiectasis and OsteoArthritis varies on a daily basis. This is often a hindrance and always a challenge. At times, I wanted to give up. But I didn’t, because sometimes, on good days (or hours), in the flow of creating, even pain disappears.
I know stitching is a counter-intuitive choice, given my reduced fine motor skills… but in other ways, sewing is a practical choice, as I can do it sitting down.
List of Works
Annamaria Weldon
Under the Surface
(2025-2026)
freestyle embroidery on hand painted silk with cotton backing and multimedia embellishments, framed
75cm x 59cm
NFS
Annamaria Weldon
Under the Surface – detailing various ways chronic sickness informed the 14 month stitching process
(2026)
captioned prints
15cm x 15cm each
NFS
Annamaria Weldon
Under the Surface
(2026)
poem, print on banner
105cm x 33cm
NFS
