Stars for my crown is set within an apple orchard and  this tapestry explores inherited memory, guilt, and the search for redemption across generations of women. Its imagery is rooted in the story of my great-great-grandmother, who spent periods in an asylum and was recorded as asking for “stars for her crown.” This phrase, echoing Marian symbolism, becomes a central motif, suggesting both spiritual longing and the desire for absolution.

 

Apples, traditionally symbols of sin, frame four female figures whose identities overlap between personal history and religious archetype. The first, a winged figure, contains small scenes of self-reflection, of combing hair and gazing into a bowl of water, suggesting the effort to understand and order the self. A tower within her dress evokes endurance.

 

The second figure represents the great-great-grandmother, marked by early trauma; her mother’s suicide by drowning. A delicate, imagined town within her dress suggests a vision of heaven or atonement, raising questions about whether her sense of “sin” was inherited through this loss.

 

The third figure references a form of myself. Someone who cannot seek redemption within a religious framework but who has learned to carry, or rather weave, her sins. Perhaps the greatest of all is in ending that female lineage and not wanting children. In this I was a great disappointment to my mother, and she showers the Madonna and child, embodying idealised motherhood, with stars representing wishful thinking poured over what was never realised.

 

The dancers in the last of the figures introduces some ambiguity. They could suggest the creativity and freedom and joy that the life of the artist brings, rather than that of mother. But they might also be seen as the mourning and madness that brought me to an artist’s life.

 

While drawing on religious iconography, this tapestry ultimately resists its promises of redemption, instead proposing acceptance as a more honest resolution.