The 20-Count Verse: In Sequent Toil
“This week’s work responds to Sonnet 60, Shakespeare’s meditation on Time as a relentless force. I wanted to create imagery that reflects the fragile balance between life’s fleeting moments and enduring beauty.
“The patterned geometry of a Turkish rug became the visual motif. By translating its intricate design on the book’s cover, I transformed a textile usually left underfoot into an object of contemplation, echoing the sonnet itself. Stitched on a 20-count Penelope canvas using the continental stitch, each deliberate motion became a parallel to Shakespeare’s craft: beauty shaped through patient accumulation. Each stitch a line of verse, each row a wave of time.
“In Shakespeare’s sonnets, each line is perfected through inherited structures of meter, rhyme, and metaphor. In embroidered bindings, each stitch and pattern reflects generations of knowledge and care. Repetition in both is generative, creating resonance and subtle variation within a strict framework. Time, the figure whose ‘scythe mows down all,’ threatens both woven fabric and written verse, yet neither yields easily to erasure. Their patterns and structures become forms of resistance, holding their shapes even as the world shifts. In this quiet defiance, labor and formalized structure transform into enduring beauty that time may touch but cannot wholly undo.
“The 20-Count Verse: In Sequent Toil is my hand-made meditation on persistence, pattern, and the enduring dialogue between art and Time.”
Suzanne Coley
Shakespeare's Sonnet 60
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end,
Each changing place with that which goes before;
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Nativity, once in the main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crowned,
Crookèd eclipses ’gainst his glory fight,
And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth
And delves the parallels in beauty’s brow,
Feeds on the rarities of Nature’s truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow.
And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.
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