10.5 x 18cm x 12cm
sausage casing embroidered by Nancy Cole
kelp stem basket by Jane Whitten
Seaweed and Guts is about the horrors of human trafficking and is a response to the October 2019 suffocation of 39 young Vietnamese in the back of a lorry in the UK. Cole’s element is the pig intestine hand embroidered with tiny, silk, seed stitches representing ‘flight’ and 39 red French knots. One for each lost life. Whitten continued with the fragility of the piece by attaching the guts to her signature stabilized seaweed referencing the basket boats used in Vietnam. The Asian aesthetic is obvious.