“I do write like I do everything else, without thought. My heart takes over.” Sharon reflects. Now in her eighties and writing from her home atop a hill in Provence, we’ve been exchanging back and forth emails about many aspects of her life. What follows is part one of those conversations which draws on her reflections around heartwork.
“We are normally back on Vinalhaven, running our shop by now!” Sharon is referring to Marston House on the island of Vinalhaven in Maine on the east coast of the US. Marston House is a culmination of both Sharon and her husband Paul's life’s work in both antiques and architecture.
Of all the antique pieces she has collected over the years, it is linen, specifically French antique homespun linen that has called to her most. This is where the idea of ‘heartwork’ comes in, a word that surfaced often during our conversations about textiles. I asked her what she meant by it. “The heartwork of cloth, I throw out these feelings I have about cloth without ever questioning what I have just said. Until someone like you Catherine do!”
It was a spring buying trip to England some years ago that first sparked her deep-rooted connection to heartwork. Arriving early to the Bath show, Sharon and Paul found themselves amongst the stallholders preparing for the next day. No one had asked them to leave and so they lingered and before long discovered they could do some buying.
“I came across Elizabeth Baer’s stall, I had not known of her before.” Baer the late British antiques dealer was known for sourcing the best French antique linens and fabrics. “I was aware of the shaker textiles back in the US, seen in a museum or two. I just could not leave her booth! It was a lot like falling in love, I realise now after three decades that it was the makers heartwork I was feeling.” recalls Sharon.
Reflecting on this reminds her of her father’s view that anything made by hand bears a signature. Sharon grew up thinking there was a signature, an initial or more but realised holding this homespun antique french linen sheet that the signature was nothing to be seen but something to be felt. What mattered to her was the thought of someone taking time to make it with their hands, with care and patience. “Dad has long since passed so I never had the opportunity to ask what he really meant, but I knew it was exactly what he meant.”
You can sense in her words that this was a long-held inner belief for her, that heartwork means believing in what you see and hear in your heart. “This is what I meant. Heartwork is magic. Whether it’s showing a child a blossom on a branch or a leaf. It is the truest communication from the beginning of time. Before bloody technology! Just feeling our way and finding ourselves lost in the work of the heart.”
Sharon is adamant that the work of the heart, working with our hands, is our saving grace: “This way of life is more vital than any amount of money we will or ever could earn. It’s not what we have earned that will remain, but what we have tended.”
