Cartography of the unknown: Walking, stitching and transformation

In the tradition of creative practices’ embodied knowledge and research, this article narrates my experience of trauma due to becoming suddenly disabled. The article relates how engaging with stitching helped me deal with the sudden loss of a leg, cope with my new condition as a disabled person, repair my wounded self, find my feet in a new world and open pathways of new knowledge and consciousness. The article makes a strong case for the transformative potential of craft and craft-making by way of three complementary arguments that contribute to expanding and deepening research into the nature of craft widely, and of stitching specifically. Firstly, it argues that stitching – and more widely craft – is a language in its own terms that allows expressing oneself before and beyond verbal language. Secondly, in offering the possibility to make sense ‘through the hands’, to reconfigure and, thus, repair one wounded self, stitching transformative power goes well beyond its therapeutic nature as it is conventionally defined. Thirdly, it shows that stitching can open the doors onto a different type of knowledge that comes from a source other than the intellect or the rational mind, thus becoming a way of knowing in its own terms and a mode of learning ‘other ways’.