Ruth Thomas

niais/concept

N O T H I N G I S A S I T S E E M S

Every ten minutes, a woman is killed by an intimate partner or a family member

At first glance, this work gives a cheerful overall impression with its bright colours, pleasant pattern and playful yarn ends. But nothing is as it seems.

Behind the apparently appealing surface lies a very different truth, as the colours and pattern of the embroidery are defined by a single sentence, namely: ‘A woman is killed every ten minutes’. The sentence itself is not a visible part of the work, and yet it determines its entire outcome.

Each colour stands for a letter. The pattern is also determined by the letters, whose shapes define the spacing and width of the lines: Each line is the graphic continuation of the respective letter. To create the grid of intertwined lines, the statement was divided into two parts as follows:

The first part (‘A woman is killed’), which has to be imagined horizontally at the bottom of the embroidery, defines the vertical lines. The second part (‘every ten minutes’), which has to be imagined vertically at the right-hand edge of the embroidery, defines the horizontal lines.

The full statement reads: ‘A woman is killed every ten minutes by a close relative or intimate partner’. It was published on 25/11/2024 in a UN report, revealing that 60 percent of the 85,000 femicides worldwide in 2023 were committed by intimate partners or close relatives of the victims.

Most of these femicides are hidden behind a contexture of lies, which is symbolically represented in this work by the interwoven coloured lines.

(Embroidered acrylic yarn on linen, 31 x 27 cm, 2025)

This work was realised as a contribution to the 'Contexture' exhibition in The House of Smalls, Edinburgh, UK – an exhibition showcasing the textile work of female artists responding to their experiences of being a woman.

Visual illustration of the concept

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