After

This is the title work from my solo show at Craft ACT in 2020 that was inspired by EM Forster’s 1909 novella The Machine Stops. I was imagining how we would adapt to a post digital existence and how we can rebuild our connections with reality – nature, one another and ourselves. To create this work I put myself in a reduced digital environment for 3 months. Doing multi day hikes while carrying and working on this embroidery in the New Zealand back country. I finished it upon returning to Adelaide during the first covid lockdowns, which saw our world thrust in a very digitally dependent existence not dissimilar to the one described in the Machine Stops. Which was interesting to experience, because prior to this I hadn’t been able to imagine what would make a society fear direct human contact and get everything through a ‘machine’ or for us, the internet.

photo credit: Madisyn Zabel