Sara DeRose – Apology Tour

Apology Tour is born of my love of slow fiber crafts[1], the oddness of middlescence[2], and an unreasonable amount of curiosity about people I will never meet[3].

I think in words and pictures for others for a living[4], so my brain naturally orients this way all the time — collecting, crafting, connecting things to make meaning. I was curious — what would doing the same work, in a completely different context, without all the capitalist constraints (fast! make a profit! be original!) produce?

The process became the purpose (slow! cheap! borrowed!): photographs of strangers[5], someone else's language of confession[6], and my own hands, slowly, with a needle. Embroidery takes real time — an hour for a line that takes five seconds to say, even less to think — and that intentional friction around the binds that tie us, felt like the point.

I don't know these people or their lives. I don't know what they are sorry for, if they'd want an apology, or from whom, or for what. I created this show anyway, because I think most of us are overdue to slow down and say the things — to someone, to ourself, to no one, to whoever's still looking.


[1] Embroidery, knitting, crochet, weird installations. As it turns out, my creative and artistic pursuits have one thing in common: they are all decidedly very analog and generally slow, probably the result of my central nervous system needing a natural counterweight to the speed of the digital, hyperconnected world around me.

[2] The transitional phase of midlife, mirroring adolescence as a period of identity reshuffling rather than a panic-driven crisis (crossing fingers). It is an odd feeling to live in the present whilst feeling the weight of the past and trying to make out the shape of the future simultaneously. Anyone else, or just me?

[3] Honestly, my curiosity about things that have zero bearing on my life is not constrained to people. The limit does not exist.

[4] I co-own FIXER, a small but mighty branding & design studio.

[5] I am a frequent flier of our local scrap store, where people donate old art supplies and whatever else they no longer want — including, it turns out, boxes of old family photographs. I have returned, many times over many months, picking through them, poring over new additions and collecting them like old friends. Who were these people? What was happening the day this photo was taken? What did the rest of their life look like, outside the one second the camera caught? How did these even get here?

[6] A wiki rabbit hole* that started with the atomic bomb ended with stumbling upon a short film written by Max Porter called All of This Unreal Time — a man roughly my age (Cillian Murphy, I stan) walking through a city at night, confessing everything: his failures, small and enormous, personal and not, to people who may never hear it. It's not a film about being forgiven, or regret, per se but a reflective journey from dark to light. These words are his.