Peacemakers’ ball: woven Belfast stories
by Allan LEONARD
8 February 2025
In coloured chalk on a black board, a sign outside Belfast’s city centre communal space at 2 Royal Avenue invited passersby to come in and participate in Peacemakers, a craft exercise to make stitches with alternating colours of yarn on an oversized French loom, then return to watch it metamorphise into a beautiful object, figuratively and literally made by the hands and stories of hundreds of individuals.
Peacemakers is the creative concept by Heidi and Peter Gardner, a visual artist duo based in Glasgow. 4 Corners Festival co-organiser, Steve Stockman, knew about this work, and after being introduced to Peter and Heidi last summer, promptly invited them to this year’s festival.
Heidi explained that the genesis of Peacemakers goes back to 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea. Peter, her husband and working for a church in city-centre Glasgow, was aware of the feeling of helplessness and hopelessness. Heidi continued:
“Starting to build up our art practice, we just felt a compulsion to make something in the face of that violence, and we wanted it to be something totally tactile and soft… we knew it would be a textile piece. We thought it shouldn’t be hard and something that if people didn’t speak English at all, it would be easy to demonstrate.
“We came up with the idea of making a giant, French knitting loom, based on what both of us had as a child, which was a little, cotton reel with four nails in it, and you would do the same stitch. It would make this long tube, and that is what this loom does.”
Meanwhile, a young, teenage girl is with her uncle, and she shows him how to do the elementary stitch. He gets the hang of it and is compulsively completing more, moving counter-clockwise, peg by peg.
The contraption is some construction. Heidi described how they were fortunate to find the three wood circles (1.8m in diameter), found in a skip, making just the right scale. After awkwardly transporting the large loom by a hired van, they figured out how to cut the circles into pieces, to deconstruct and reconstruct: “Now it goes into our car.”
One of their criteria for an event is an open, front door — to be visible, accessible, and welcoming to visitors. Indeed, Heidi remarked that there’s an opportunity to converse with the visitors:
“We think of it as a listening post. So, when we’re actually at the loom, Peter or I try to purely listen to our visitors. Sometimes people want to do stitching in silence, sometimes people are chatting, and often what happens is people tell their story.
“Our job is to listen to that story.
“Often, it’s easier to tell a stranger your story than somebody you know. It amazes me the things that people will share. Every time we go somewhere, there’s a sense in which we sort of know what to expect, but things still surprise you.”
Looking at the days of work on the loom, the weave is not the output of a single person working on a solitary project, but by many people and with many stories, embedded in the yarn.
“Even the yarn brings its own stories,” Heidi said. She told of how earlier in the week, with the supply of balls of yarn running low — they rely on donations of used not new wool — a woman came in with a small ball that came from a recent clearing out of a deceased relative’s house. Heidi relayed the remark, “I know that if my great-aunt had been here, she would have wanted to be a part of this.”
By now other visitors arrived and are making their contributions to the weave. This will go on for a few more days, before the next stages of “casting off”. At this point, what looks like a loose pile of netting gets pulled and transformed into to a narrow tube, nearly tripling in size. The tube is laid on the ground, when it is measured before being tightly wound into a multi-coloured ball.
Heidi described a physical, emotive connection in this process:
“We run every stitch through our hands. All of these strangers have touched that wool. At the end, it somehow is important to physically touch that again… It’s a form of gathering up everything that has been said around this.”
Peter also remarked on this reconnection:
“When you run your hands through the threads afterwards, you’re reconnecting with all of those stories — a recollection and celebration of contributions of all these people.
“The wool in the room becomes the symbol of the shared activity.
“Right now, people are doing one stitch [at a time], and they’re looking down and seeing their stitches as part of many stitches.”
Days later, the woven netting on the floor, inside the loom, is noticeably greater. Peter and Heidi asked the visitors to assemble around the loom, to assist in lifting the circumference of the cast-off woven tube off the loom and onto the floor.
Heidi and Peter work together to transform the wide tube. She ran the tube through her hands, with tension that narrows its width. He laid down the strand from end to end, again with visitors’ assistance; their feet became ground posts to weave the lengthening strand.
After measuring the 92-metre strand, Heidi and Peter again work in tandem. He sat in a chair and began tightly winding up the strand into a ball, concentrating on keeping it round and making the most of the ever-changing colours.
After half an hour and stiffening wrists, a large, near two-foot wide, heavy, colourful wool ball was shared with all present, who acknowledge their and other participants’ collective work with applause.
Catherine Largey, part of the 4 Corners Festival team, summarised the result eloquently:
“We have woven the stories of the people from the four corners of Belfast together. That’s what that ball is.”
This peacemakers’ ball was presented to the 4 Corners Festival organisers at the closing events at St Colmcilles Parish, Belfast, on Sunday, 9th February.