As this year’s World Parkinson’s Day (11 April) approached, Hamburg artist and person with Parkinson’s May Evers was busy sewing the final stitches of her P-Quilt, a handmade textile installation depicting the faces of 185 people with Parkinson’s from all over the world.
Three years ago, May began her project by calling on the international Parkinson’s community to send in photographs of themselves – and people from Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Spain, Italy, Great Britain, Ireland, the USA, Canada, Australia, Vietnam, India and the Canary Islands responded.
May used the photographs to cross-stitch monochrome portraits by hand onto coloured squares of brown, purple, yellow and blue fabric. She then joined the squares together to create a 2-metre by 1.60-metre tapestry. Together, the images form a large face that symbolises the close bond the Parkinson’s community has forged through having the condition.
“The initial inspiration came from a friend who makes pop-art photographs, and then I came across some pixel-art pictures and took it from there,” says May, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s ten years ago at the age of 50. “What I want to express with the picture is fairly simple. I wanted to show in a creative way that each and every person has a very individual experience of Parkinson’s and yet we are all in the same boat.”
She adds, “Art and creativity are powerful tools to address complex issues like Parkinson’s. With art, we can encourage dialogue and understanding of the challenges people with Parkinson’s face every day.”
May also documented the painstaking process of creating the quilt on her blog, Der Erste Fisch (The First Fish), on which she writes about her various other crafting projects, including crochet, knitting and embroidery, and her journey with Parkinson’s. On the blog, she poetically described the process of creating the quilt as:
“With each cross stitch, the life story of the person whose portrait I was embroidering unfolded. I knew many people personally, and I only got to know many of them through the project. Many have told me their stories or written as part of the project. Some I only got to know long after I had stitched their portrait and it was as if I already knew them.”
She also described the moment she realised she’d finally finished the Parkinson’s quilt, coincidentally just in time for World Parkinson’s Day, as being “filled with a mixture of feelings of awe, melancholy and pride at the completed project.”
Now it’s finished, May is hoping that the 10-metre-square quilt can be displayed publicly somewhere, and she also hopes she might be able to sell the quilt and donate the proceeds to the Hilde-Ulrichs-Stiftung für Parkinsonforschung (Hilde-Ulrichs Foundation for Parkinson’s Research) – a German charity that helps people with Parkinson’s access non-medicinal therapies – at which May is a patient representative. She’s asked that anyone with knowledge of potential sponsors, curators or other ideas should contact her via her blog.
Find out more about the creation of the P-quilt and May Evers’ other crafting projects on her blog, Der Erste Fisch
Photo Credits: Anita Borchers
