Stitching Stories of Strength

 

Last month, I was interviewed by Sian Goff , textileartist.org and here is the resulting article 

Member Spotlight: Wilma Simmons 

Stitching stories of strength

When Wilma Simmons retired at 55 after a career as a high school principal, she made herself a promise: whatever came next would be creative. Two decades later, that promise has grown into a practice rooted in storytelling, sustainability, and a deep respect for the women who came before her.

Based in Newcastle, Australia, Wilma has become a fixture of the textile art world, a longtime volunteer at the Timeless Textiles Gallery, a two-time solo exhibitor, and a member of Stitch Club almost since its very first year. Talking with her, it's easy to see why her work resonates: every piece carries a narrative, and every material has been chosen because it means something.

Wilma Simmons, Thorax with Eucalyptus.

Wilma Simmons, Wall, inspired by Ana Buzzalino.

From clay and jewellery to cloth

Wilma's creative path didn't begin with textiles. Before retirement, she trained formally in contemporary clay and spent time designing jewellery, teaching at stitches-and-craft shows around Australia. But something about jewellery never quite satisfied her.

"I didn't feel it was the right medium... it is all just very superficial. Stitching became so much more - I guess part of my soul was released somehow."

It was picking back up a creative embroidery correspondence course, one she'd set aside while completing a master's degree, that brought her back to textiles. Around the same time, a textile art gallery opened in Newcastle, and Wilma became involved almost immediately. She's been immersed in the medium ever since.

Wilma Simmons, Enveloping Exhibition, Timeless Textiles Gallery.

Wilma Simmons, Stitched up Dolls.

Letting materials carry the message

If there's a single thread running through Wilma's body of work, it's her conviction that the material itself should be inseparable from the story it tells.

That philosophy has led her to some striking, unexpected choices. For a piece about her Chinese heritage, she stitched with used tea bags, drawing on tea's significance in her family history. For an installation memorialising 193 girls who lived in a 19th-century Newcastle welfare institution, she built dolls from sticks and scraps of cloth, imagining how the girls themselves, with almost nothing, might have made their own toys. Working alongside a local historian who had documented each girl's life, Wilma gave form to stories that might otherwise have been lost.

Perhaps her most unusual material discovery came almost by accident. Wanting to explore the healing properties of plants, Wilma began stitching botanical imagery onto old X-rays - hand-embroidering eucalyptus leaves and other medicinal plants directly onto the films, using dissolvable fabric to build the stitching before punching holes through the X-ray itself and sewing it in place.

"It's not easy to do," she admits of the punching and stitching. But word spread, and now friends and neighbours arrive at her door with suitcases of old X-rays - of broken legs, broken fingers, chests once shadowed by pneumonia - each one a small, discarded piece of somebody's medical history, waiting for a second life.

Wilma Simmons, Metacarpals with Kangaroo Paw / Patella with Lichen and Shelf Funghi.

Nothing goes to waste

That instinct, to give overlooked, discarded things new purpose, extends into everything Wilma makes. She's candid about what motivates it: partly sustainability, Wilma is appalled by the amount of textile waste that goes into landfill, and partly a fascination with transformation itself.

One of her most moving recent works began with a bag of women's handkerchiefs - beloved by an elderly woman who had passed away, but unwanted by her children and grandchildren. Wilma turned each handkerchief into a feather, and the feathers into a pair of human-sized wings. The woman's daughter, who hadn't wanted the handkerchiefs herself, was delighted with the wings.

Wilma Simmons, Wings & Wings (detail).

"I really love that idea - that these handkerchiefs were so loved by this woman but not wanted by the next generation... once they were made into something else, they were quite desirable."

Since then, more bags of inherited handkerchiefs have found their way to her - each one, she says, holding "a hundred stories to tell." She's currently stitching miniature gardens onto them.

Wilma Simmons, Edith - Stitched Garden (detail).

A practice built on planning and surprise

Despite the intuitive, story-led feel of her work, Wilma describes herself as a planner, sometimes to a fault. "I guess my main fault would be overthinking a concept," she laughs. She sketches extensively before starting, though her plans rarely survive intact - as with the X-ray series, which shifted entirely once she realised real X-rays, sourced from friends and family, would tell a far more powerful story than embroidered outlines of generic body parts.

That balance between careful planning and openness to serendipity was tested when Wilma took part in a collaborative exhibition with a friend early in her exhibiting career. The two artists, she discovered, worked in completely different rhythms - her friend moved quickly and had nineteen pieces finished before Wilma had settled on her third or fourth. It wasn't the show's commercial outcome that stuck with her, but what it taught her about her own process, and about textile art more broadly.

"It made me really appreciate other textile artists' work so much more. I see other artists' work critically but sympathetically as well."

Wilma Simmons, Gold Collage 1 & 2, inspired by Jette Clover.

Stitch Club and beyond

Wilma has been a Stitch Club member since nearly the beginning, and describes finding real value across the whole range of workshops. A collage workshop with Jette Clover led to an invitation to join Clover's year-long master's course - the two later met in person when Clover travelled to Australia. Techniques picked up from other workshops - coiling, needle sculpting, dyeing - regularly resurface, remixed, in Wilma's stick-figure dolls and mixed-media pieces, one fabric sometimes threading its way through several completely different works. One notable example is her ‘Summer Forest Matriarch’, pictured below.

Wilma Simmons, Summer Forest Matriarch, created with fabric dyed using Deb Cooper’s techniques and fabric wraps from Julia Wright’s workshop.

Inspired by a recent Stitch Club workshop, Wilma is deep into a personal book project profiling tribal women across the South Pacific and Southeast Asia, with a particular focus on women in Papua New Guinea and Nepal - two countries where she's done hands-on volunteer work herself.

Wilma Simmons, Portraits 1 & 2 (works in progress), inspired by Batool Showghi.

 

In Papua New Guinea's Eastern Highlands, while her husband was building a school, Wilma organised funding to bring ten hand-operated sewing machines to a village with unreliable electricity. She asked the women what they wanted most, and delivered it - along with needles, thread, and fabric bought locally to support the regional economy. The very first thing every woman wanted to sew was curtains, for privacy in one-room woven houses. School uniforms and clothing came next.

In Nepal, Wilma supported Seven Women, an organisation founded after its creator discovered seven disabled women living in a shed, melting down discarded restaurant candles to survive. One of those original seven women, once abandoned by her family, is now an accountant and runs the organisation herself.

"Textiles can change lives.”

Wilma Simmons, Bound & Blue Interlude with Tea (detail).

Honouring the women who came before

Underpinning almost everything Wilma makes is her family history - one she describes as "a long line of very strong women." Her father died when she was young, leaving her mother to raise Wilma and her sister alone. Her husband's English family includes several women who were politicians. Photographs of Wilma's great-grandmother and grandmother, and her

husband's ancestors, have found their way into her mixed-media pieces.

For her recent 100 Day Project, Wilma chose to spotlight inspiring women largely absent from mainstream history. It's a natural extension of everything else she makes: work about resilience, about voices that went unheard, about strength passed down through generations - whether or not it was ever formally recorded.

Wilma Simmons, 100 Day Project - Inspiring Women.

What's next

Retirement is not on Wilma's agenda - not really. Instead, she's focused on passing her skills to the next generation, teaching her granddaughter to stitch during after-school visits. She continues to meet weekly with both a community group at Timeless Textiles Gallery and the Newcastle Creative Embroiderers and Textile Artists (NCEATA), drawing energy and ideas from working alongside other makers.

"I think for me, what’s ahead is more learning.”

Wilma Simmons, at work in her garden.

It's a fitting note for an artist whose creative life began with a promise to herself at 55, and who - through tea bags, X-rays, handkerchiefs, and driftwood - has spent the two decades since finding new ways to make sure the stories of women like her great-grandmother, and the hundreds of women she's met since, don't go unheard.