Michael Cassidy Blanket & Cushion

Michael Cassidy Blanket
I’m not staying silent anymore
2025
journal entry, felt, organza, pinstriped cotton, gold thread, cyanotype

Michael Cassidy Blanket is an artwork borne out of a session I’d had with my creative mentor back 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’. In a slow, peaceful, shaky in the heart, tearful kinda way, I told her how I was sexually abused by a ‘friend’ of the family when I was seven years old. It was another death for me to deal with, the death of the innocent child me.

The dark wounds were being exposed.

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 was to give my ‘witness statement’ (such a bizarre term) to detective inspector Michael Cassidy. You might imagine that being a man, a police officer at that, he’d be the last person I’d want to share for the first time the details of what happened that night. But he had such an aura of calm around him, consideration, compassion and awareness. I felt I could trust him. He treated me with the utmost respect. He listened. He asked gently. He checked in. He knew how to read the room. Being a historical crime he could also have projected a distrust in me, my words, emotions, memory, and tried to prove me wrong, catch me out, sow seeds of doubt. Not Michael Cassidy. He took what I had to say seriously, professionally and with importance. He also took me by surprise me by asking me about the repercussions of that night, of which there were, and continue to be many, of which for the most part were minimised.

It was as I was writing up my notes from the session with my mentor that I felt such a great wave of appreciation for this man. I drew his name in block letters and surrounded it with a shining star.

I had started thinking about blankets, metaphorically and literally. Here I was, taking another courageous step in digging down into the deep to find the blocks to my creative self, and how, through dedication and determination, at 54 years old I was finally committing myself to my art practice. Something that had had so many stops and starts throughout my life. Through the very act of reconnecting with my art practice I was wrapping myself up in a blanket of love. I was loving and honouring me. Hugs were also becoming very important and a collection about them naturally started forming, initially expressed in my text based posters. Colours came to me; pastel pinks and blues, greens, yellows, violets and reds. And then my Michael Cassidy shining star said ‘and me?’ Of course! It too needed to be a blanket, symbolic of the warmth and care I was given that I felt enveloped in. It needed the richness of gold and my favourite colours from a favourite childhood cardigan; pale pink and cerulean blue. It needed to shine, and it needed some context. I played around with ideas to combine it with a journal entry written four days before my mentoring session. I had ideas of how I wanted it to look and felt compelled to create the artwork as a life size blanket.

The seed had been planted and was quietly germinating away, mulling over how technically, it could be realised.

And then, mid 2025 All Us Women presented itself, a project that supports women in their experiences of violence through creative expression. I would be able to gently carry my little seedling to a sensitive space, and through the use of stitch and cyanotype, a process I’d not initially imagined, make visible my working ideas thus far. I wanted to honour this man, a total stranger, who potentially could have made my reporting of the crime a nightmare.

The A4 blanket created is the beginning of that honouring, my working out of ideas and as such a work in progress. There’s still lots to do to make the blanket life size, which is the dream; techniques to learn, technical problems to be solved, and of course taking the next bold step to take up space.

Whilst that’s all simmering away, the delectable pink felted star however had no hesitation in letting me know it needed to burst out of the cloth, to get big, soft and squishy, to become three dimensional, tactile and to be a cushion!

How could I say no!