Can working with your hands improve your mood? For Kisook Suh, a textile conservator at The Met, there’s deep satisfaction and purpose in caring for tapestries that are hundreds of years old. But her artistry doesn’t stop there: once home, she relaxes by mending holes in her young son’s blue jeans and rescuing clothes that otherwise might be discarded. Kisook describes the solace found in repairing things—stitch by stitch—and how the process itself fosters hope for other kinds of healing, whether broken relationships or her mother’s ill health in Korea.
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Transcript
Kisook Suh:
The more time I spend with an object, tapestry, textile, the more you hear their story. Like, oh, this must have happened to you. All the objects have their own history, their own way of surviving up to this point. And we kind of find all the evidence and traces of it and really understanding it, like understanding a person.
Barron B. Bass:
Welcome to Frame of Mind, a podcast from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, about how art connects with wellness in our everyday lives. Working with needle and thread, maybe it’s not your go-to method for calming down, but this week we invite you to consider mending in a whole new light. We’re going deep below the public galleries at The Met, to the tunnels and corridors the public rarely sees. It’s a hive of activity where staff study, preserve, and conserve works of art in the museum’s collection, including about 36,000 tapestries, carpets, embroideries, and other varieties of textiles.
Meet Kisook Suh, a textile conservator at The Met. Kisook finds meaning in her work with needle and thread, whether she's working in these studios or taking care of her family's clothing at home. She sees mending as its own kind of hope.
Kisook Suh:
Working with textiles has been always part of the life of women, mostly in my parents’ or grandparents’ generation, back in South Korea. So I know my grandmother made beautiful embroidery. My father’s side grandmother—she was a weaver. And my mom always sewed and made things with fabrics. And I think it passed me the idea that making something with textile, needle, and thread is something always around us. And I didn’t really think it will be a very important part of my profession, but I think it makes sense.
What I see in common at work and at home, sewing and mending and all this, is the care. Care about things, care about the material, care about what we have. Care about anything around us. You fixed something broken, damaged, and put things in a better shape, so it could have a longer life. This process can help you lift your heart and keep you going.
I live in Tarrytown—it’s in Westchester county. I live with my husband and two little kids. All my family are back in South Korea. The reason I’m here is because of my amazing work.
My first tapestry project I took on was ten years ago. And overwhelming, absolutely overwhelming! It’s vivid memory though. It was a falcon’s bath tapestry, from the Cloisters collection. The falcon’s bath was an early fifteenth century tapestry. And the tapestry depicts a falconry that I’d learned that was a popular sport of upper-class in medieval Europe.
The Falcon’s Bath, 1495-1505. South Netherlandish. Tapestry with wool warp and wool wefts, 137 1/2 x 145 1/2 in. (349.3 x 369.6 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Cloisters Collection, 2011, (2011.93)
The tapestry shows very well-dressed ladies and gentlemen. In the center, they are giving a bath to a falcon. And behind them was a trellis of roses and it's beautiful. And easily over 5 —600 years old. It’s unbelievable! Um, I myself, in front of the tapestry, am I really touching this six hundred years old textile and they're still here?
There was no big damage. It was just the small signs of deterioration. And that was it. So for me, it was perfect for my first tapestry project.
People compare conservators with doctors. And I agree with that. We really treat our objects like patients. So the first thing, like you walk into the doctor’s office, we do examinations, sometimes involve some analysis to understand what’s the condition. And like doctors do, we diagnose the object. And then we make treatment decision—what to do with this condition issue?
Our treatment method can be very different from one object to another. Depending on the condition, mostly we use the needle and a thread and fabric. After a while working on this minute work, you step back and see the area you worked on. You see the image that originally they wanted to depict, kind of show up like a magic. Not a huge change we make, but we can see by restoring this physical element one by one, I’m kind of reconstructing the original weaver's work as it originally intended to be.
Of course, because of the age, uh, they have damages. Not only by natural degradation, by the use and how they were handled in the history. It is alive and it is getting old all the time. And we cannot reverse that. When it comes to treatment, we find so many traces of old restoration, many, many generations.
We don’t remove all the historical traces on the tapestry. So we're kind of building up a database, this restoration on top of this one. Okay. So then some genealogy, some timeline we are making, and I'm very curious what kind of a story it can tell us.
Kisook working in The Met’s Textile Conservation Department. Courtesy of Kisook Suh.
The satisfaction and the joy I find in my work, I continue to do it at home by mending my clothes and textiles. I may say my biggest client is my son, who constantly makes holes in the knees of his pants. And I patch the holes with scraps of fabric that I have, and he can wear the pants for a while after that.
And the most recent and rewarding one I mend was my mother-in-law’s cashmere gloves. You know how soft they are, and they so easily get holes in the finger area. But it’s still good. The cashmere’s such a precious material, I couldn’t throw them away.
It’s a huge difference between, well, what I do at the museum and what I do at home. But appreciating the value of the material, I think it’s not that different. And as much as I want the museum object to have a longer life in the collection and being appreciated by the visitors, that they can learn about it and enjoy it. I feel the same at home. The clothes that we wear, I hope they have longer life too, and age with us and be part of our life, as long as it can be.
When it comes to repair and mending, it’s just a simple manual work. Tedious, it could be. But we can processes a lot of difficult ideas in our head by doing so. Those process really helps me going through difficult time that I cannot do anything about.
My mother is in her late seventies and my father in early eighties. They both are in Korea. And I think anybody who has parents around their age experience the same difficulty, which is seeing them getting old, being weak. And my mother was very unfortunate that she had a stroke twice and she has been in bed condition for many years. And as a daughter who lives so far from them and cannot really do much about it, I was devastated, and it was quite depressing.
I didn’t know how to deal with this emotion, very hard emotion that I was going through. But I think it really helped that I worked every day. So in the morning I come to the department, sit in front of my tapestry and I work. And I was able to concentrate at working. And the project that I was doing at the time involves treatment, very repetitive treatment, mostly bridging broken warps on the tapestry.
The warp was made of linen, which became extremely fragile. I knew what I needed to do—bridging them one after another—hundreds of them, I believe. And during the concentration, I became very calm. I find myself getting less emotional and the work, putting the broken elements together, I think it was quite healing to me.
And with my mom’s situation, I don’t know. There’s nothing I can do about her illness and the difficult conditions she’s going through. But the work I did kind of gave me a message of hope. Things can be restored. Brokenness can be put together. Maybe wounds can be healed. And when I’m doing that act, even though that's not solving the problem, I kind of accept it. And those processes really helped me going through the difficult time that I cannot do anything about.
When I struggle with some difficult ideas, and I feel some conflict and being very distracted, I go to my pile of clothes and start mending. Because you know, I can work on the tapestry in the museum, but at home, I can fix my clothes. That needs my touch, my care. Because I know that my hands are busy working, my head’s been cleared out and the outcome will be so rewarding and please me so much.
And I think that was the best way I could pass through any difficulty I'm going through in my head, because I have a productive way to spend that time and calm myself and collect myself.
And I feel it really therapeutic, I may say. We all love beautiful things and making beautiful things—it’s another level of joy.
Barron B. Bass:
Thank you for listening. This has been Frame of Mind, an art and wellness podcast from The Met. To find out more about and the artworks mentioned in this episode, please visit The Met’s website at www.metmuseum.org/frameofmind, where you’ll find bonus articles, features, resources, and videos on the endless connection between art and wellness.
Frame of Mind is produced by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Goat Rodeo. At The Met: Head of Content Sofie Andersen, Executive Producer Nina Diamond, Associate Producer Bryan Martin, and Production Coordinators Harrison Furey and Lela Jenkins. At Goat Rodeo: Rebecca Seidel is Lead Producer. Megan Nadolski is Executive Producer. Production Assistance from Char Dreyer, Isabelle Kerby-McGowan, Cara Shillenn, and Max Johnston.
Senior Producer is Ian Enright. Story Editing from Morgan Springer. Series Illustration by Sophie Schultz. I'm your host Barron B. Bass. A special thanks to our guest on this episode, Kisook Suh.
This podcast is made possible by Bloomberg Philanthropies and Dasha Zhukova Niarchos.
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Next time on Frame of Mind…
Yvette Weaver:
The second people walk into a garden space, their whole demeanor just like shifts and changes. And I think gardening now is being reminded of that. Like I’m not in control, at all. Nature’s in control. Period.
Supported by
and Dasha Zhukova Niarchos.
