Michael Cassidy Blanket
(I’m not staying silent anymore)
2025
journal entry, felt, organza, cotton, gold thread, cyanotype
Michael Cassidy Blanket is an artwork borne out of a session I’d had with my creative mentor in January 2024. I was conscious that our 12 meetings were coming to an end and before they did I knew I needed to tell her about that night. Being intuitive she began our meeting by talking about relationships. I had my ‘in’ and in a slow, peaceful, but shaky in the heart, tearful kinda way, I told her how I was sexually abused when I was seven years old. It was another death to deal with, the death of the innocent child me.
The dark wounds were being let out.
I felt exhausted after.
In 2014, with the support of a dear friend, (I couldn’t have done it without her), I finally found the courage to report the crime. I gave my ‘witness statement’ (I found it such a bizarre term, I had never considered myself a ‘witness’), to Detective Inspector Michael Cassidy, who treated me with so much care, consideration and kindness. And it was as I was writing up my notes from my session with my mentor that I felt such a great wave of appreciation for him so drew his name surrounded by a shining star. I later played around with it, photocopying it and combining it with one of my journal entries. I felt compelled to create the artwork as a life size blanket.
The seed had been planted.
And it’s been quietly germinating away, wondering ever since how to be made.
And then, mid 2025 I became involved in the project All Us Women, a project that supports women in their experiences of violence through creative expression. I felt like a great opportunity had presented itself to gently carry my little seedling to a sensitive space, and through the use of stitch and cyanotype, make visible my working ideas thus far. I wanted to honour this man, a total stranger, a police officer, who potentially could have made my reporting of the crime a nightmare.
The A4 sample blanket created here is the beginning of that honouring, my working out of ideas, a continual work in progress. There’s still lots to do to make the blanket life size, which is the dream; techniques to learn and technical problems to be solved, but whilst that’s simmering on the stove the star made a point of telling me it needed to break free of the sample blanket, it needed to be big, take up space, and … to be a cushion!
How could I say no!
It felt so good to be making again, and to be sourcing fabrics and tools.
back to front double exposure journal entry
my first steps in revealing
something so private so public
Tiger.On.The.Rock 