Stitched Up

In December 2013, pedestrians walking up the Creggan Road from central Derry were greeted by a 23-metre-long neon display that had been installed on the roof of the old Rosemount Shirt Factory. Overlooking the River Foyle, it bore the message: ‘A Stitch in TimeEtchells, TimA Stitch in Time’. The installation was created by the English artist Tim EtchellsEtchells, Tim, founder of the performance group Forced Entertainment, and was commissioned as a part of the Lumière Light Festival, held in Derry to conclude their year as the inaugural UK City of Culture. According to the artist, the sign was designed to evoke both the ‘timely and patient work of mending lives, communities, political and social relations’ and to provoke ‘a kind of imaginative looping back, a trip in time to something forgotten that is again suddenly present; the factory, the memoryMemory of another culture of labourLabour and of other forms of work and community’ (2014).