Fabric artist Evelyn Hoey honors victims of gun violence with handmade daily memorial.
Perhaps the most touching person to come to Evelyn Hoey’s showing of her art collection titled “We Felt the Loss of Them” was a woman Hoey had never met but for whom she had prayed the year before.
It was the mom of a 17-year-old boy who lost his life by suicide with a loaded, unlocked gun he found in his home.
“I didn’t know anything about her at all until she came up and spoke to me,” Hoey remembers.
The encounter occurred in August 2023 at an art showing of Hoey’s handmade felt and sewing. On display were 12 calendars she spent a year creating. From January 2022 to January 2023, Hoey methodically hand-stitched every day for roughly 365 days, making a single French knot for each life lost to guns the day before. The French knots represented deaths from gun violence, including mass shootings, deaths from self-defense, accidental shootings, and suicide.
She didn’t miss a day of sewing, taking the project with her on vacation and continuing, despite painful arthritis made worse by the repetitive handiwork. By the time the year was done, Hoey had sewn 44,357 French knots, the number of Americans killed by guns in 2022. One of those knots memorialized the 17-year-old boy.
Upon their meeting, his mother said something surprising. “Thank you for noticing,” she said. “Thank you for acknowledging.”
Twenty-one people died in the mass school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022. There are 21 French knots in Hoey’s work for them. As she sewed, she prayed in real-time. “I could pray for them as individuals and for their families, bystanders, EMS, hospital workers,” she said. “These are real people. And the trauma that is being experienced by the loved ones of the people who die.”
Hoey monitored statistics on deaths each day in America for her project. Mass shootings are just part of the picture. Hoey’s French knots illustrate that many deaths are the result of suicide, mental illness, and unsupervised children. Some are in self-defense. Hoey felt overwhelmed by the numbers and wanted to say something through her art. She hoped to help bring attention to what she had begun to discover are staggering statistics. “I felt like if I’m like this, most people must be like this because it’s not like I don’t pay attention,” Hoey said.
Hoey hasn’t always been an artist. She began her foray into art at age 66 at Wayne State University, close to her home in Detroit, Michigan. Married for 50 years to Covenant pastor Robert Hoey, she is a mother of five, grandmother of nine, and a long-time member of Hope Community Church, a Covenant congregation in Detroit.
When Hoey retired from a career in education, she wanted to learn how to weave on a loom. She soon found herself pursuing a full-blown Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. She had never taken an art class before.
Hoey is an environmentally conscious consumer who loves natural dyes and often weaves trash and recyclables into her textile-based artwork. Consumerism and waste weigh heavily on her heart.
From Isaiah 51:6, Hoey thinks of the earth like a worn-out garment. “The earth will wear out like a garment, and its inhabitants die like flies. But my salvation will last forever. My righteousness will never fail.”
“I think about a garment and how a garment can grow old by being misused and shrunken, or it can grow old by being cared for, washed, and mended,” she says.
Hoey understands her fabric art can’t mend complex realities. Instead, she hopes to illustrate Jesus’s teachings to love your enemy and inform with compassion, not condemnation.
“It’s a way, of coming alongside people and speaking something that maybe we need to hear for a change of mind or action that we can’t really hear when it’s directed right at your face.”
