Magical
Mythical
Omnipotent
Child or Joy mask,
This Widow’s Work is textile artist Kate Tume’s Instagram strapline. It’s an evocative phrase that stirs up images of a Kåthe Kollwitz-esque woman cloaked in black and stooped over some sewing. And yet Tume is just 42 and is currently in the process of making a vibrant collection of gloriously-embellished masks. Born out of grief over the death of her beloved husband Nicky in June 2021, these are Tume’s death masks. A sorrow that’s still palpably, achingly present, Tume talks of his dying with a sometimes halting voice. ‘He was an endurance athlete, the fittest person ever. He’d done an Iron Man in 2019. He never drank or smoked. There were no symptoms; he just woke up one night with severe liver pain. It was colon cancer and it had metastasised into his liver. That was in November 2020. They said he may have two years but he died within seven months.’ An activist artist with a deep spiritual connection to the natural world, Tume’s practice, prior to her partner’s death, involved the making of richlyembroidered portraits of animals. Painstakinglyresearched and embedded with often esoteric references to colour symbolism and religious and mythological iconography, these images raised questions about species loss and the lack of reverence for the sacredness of life – phenomena exacerbated, Tume believes, by the continuing effects of white supremacy and colonialism. Her husband’s diagnosis (‘the love of my life’) brought this thriving practice (at the time Tume had over 20,000 Instagram followers) to an almost complete stop. ‘I was working on a snake piece based on a real snake I’d encountered during an artist’s residency in Costa Rica in 2020. I feel now that it was a harbinger as snakes represent change and transformation. All the creative decisions about the piece were made and finishing it was cathartic. But after that I didn’t have it in me anymore.’ Tume describes it as having ‘the creative energy sucked out of me’. But she did still make, reverting back to the sewing of her childhood. ‘I charted and cross-stitched three grief pillows.’