My work with dress stories started in 2018 when I was on my MA course, working on ways to hide meaning within my textile work. I was using second hand or donated items of clothing and reclaiming them by unpicking them to provide pieces of fabric. In the process of doing this, I discovered that clothes themselves have hidden messages within them: an unpicked hem showing the original shade of colour of the garment, now long faded from sunlight, washing and wear; a let-out seam holding the stitch marks long after the thread was removed; a tear here, a patch there, a fraying at the edges.

All these things told stories about the garments; each item of clothing softly whispering to us of all they have experienced – and I wanted to learn to listen. I found interpreting these stories addictive and have sought to unlock narratives in many garments. From the donated WAAF uniform which proudly conveyed the adventures of the woman who wore it, to a dancing dress which had seen its last ball, through to a set of hand-me-down children’s dresses which spoke about my real/ not real daughter, I have learned about myself in each revealing story.

Increasingly as a human on our shared planet I have been struggling with what I can do to make a difference. I feel ill-equipped, with only negligible power and unexceptional charisma or energy, I find it overwhelming as to what I can do practically to effect change. I work in the charitable sector helping communities plant orchards, I volunteer at projects seeking to make an impact on habitat restoration, I grow my own limited supply of food and drive an electric vehicle. But is any of that reaching people and making a difference?

In recent months, I have begun to wonder if art is the way to go beyond other barriers, so I have redoubled my efforts to reflect issues in my latest set of dress projects. The first of these – a dress examining geological time - was already a nascent idea when I was made aware of the Dover History at Night project. I had recently returned to the Dover area and was excited to make a link almost immediately with the Dover Creative Network – a widely embracing network of creatives interlinked with a love for the place and people of Dover.

My inspiration started with Ladywell - the street running alongside the Maison Dieu building - named for a well spring long since built over by the Maison Dieu complex. The idea of a well guardian - a female figure who has stood watch over the waters for eons: providing healing and balm to all humanity, but now watches those precious waters contaminated and lost from sight as the population of humans rises, growing further away from the natural world and its spirit protectors.

I wanted to find a way to describe the epic length of time the waters have flowed on the site of the Maison Dieu, and how short a time after humans came to reside here that the waters became polluted. I decided after much research to represent geological ages in dye, stich, and applique, using their names and differing timescales measured out across the dress: Eon, Era, System (Period) and Series (Epoch). These names are chronological (in order of time), stratigraphic (in order of deposition of rocks - like a slice through the earth if it were a globe shaped cake), or both and can be confusingly similar.

For example: The chalk beneath Ladywell was formed in the Upper Cretaceous Epoch within the Cretaceous System, during the Mesozoic Era within the Phanerozoic Eon. All this presented quite a challenge in representing what the dress was trying to convey without being a muddle of techniques and a mush of colours.

Placing the oldest time/ deepest rocks nearest the hem of the dress, I started with Eons - the largest timespans comprising just 4 names. These were represented in plant-dye muslin letters stitched onto the base fabric, their size and coverage of the area of fabric they were applied over representing their duration.

Next, the larger number of Era names created in string print, the initial letters of each Era representing its timespan, were printed over the Eons. Finally, the stitch was layered over – using over half a km of thread. Thicker yarn was used to represent System / Period names sewn in a colour to match the applique hues of browns and yellow, with the smaller ages of Epoch/ Series in a fine machine thread matching the creamier background fabric colour. Each name repeated or stretched out to represent the length of the timespan.

The final key points of the dress were the simplest to accomplish. I wanted viewers to reflect on where humans fitted into mind-bendingly huge geological time. As we know, if earth’s 4.5 billion years were represented as a 24-hour day, humans have made their appearance somewhere in the last second. We are currently in the Holocene Epoch within the Quaternary System, during the Cenozoic Era within the Phanerozoic Eon.

Some people say that we are entering a new Epoch after the Holocene and calling it ‘Anthropocene’ or ‘The Age of Humans’ to better mark the time our species have been on the earth and the impact we are having upon it. I embroidered Anthropocene around the yoke of the dress in thick, waxed, black thread which looked like suturing thread. It takes up much more of its percentage of space than it should, but I wanted it to be plainly read.

There are also a number of small, almost hidden, red threads in the piece that mark ‘Extinction Events’, including the one which wiped out the dinosaurs arguably allowing the rise of early mammals. The dress has one of the Anthropocene’s embroidered entirely in red – a shout of attention from the guardian of the well.

Unusually for me my staring point was not a garment but a double sheet, although it is still a found item with its own story. Once completed, the sheet was transformed into a ‘peplos’ dress – a simple design worked using minimal stitching and zero cutting – a style worn by people from many cultures over centuries.

This was draped over a dressmaker’s form and the whole installed in St. Edmund’s Chapel – a deeply atmospheric and suitably ancient setting for the piece. The simple staging allows viewers to meet the piece body to body – as if the spirit of the well had taken human form – and to have a conversation with the guardian, almost hear her words - hear her whispered plea for the land to be healed and to be restored to her watery home.

The Ladywell Guardian was created by textile artist Jenni Cresswell (jennicresswell.co.uk) in partnership with St Edmund’s Chapel and the National Lottery-funded Reawakening the Maison Dieu project to transform and make accessible one of Dover's most historic buildings and to share its stories.

The Ladywell Guardian will be on display in St Edmund's Chapel, Dover as part of Heritage Open Days in Sept 2024 and inside the Maison Dieu as part of the opening year's celebrations after it reopens in 2025.