The Stitchers (working title)
A social practice project and film by Susanne Cockrell, 2016-2025
Project Statement
San Juan Ridge Tapestry Project visionary Marsha Stone was browsing in a bookstore when she saw a book about the renowned 1000-year-old Bayeux Tapestry that depicts the invasion of England in 1066. She saw how embroiderie could chronicle complex events, bought the book and began organizing her community to stitch their 50-year story of celebrations and struggles living sustainably on the the San Juan Ridge, 20 miles outside of Nevada City, California.
We are making something beautiful to describe how the land shaped us when we were a new wave of settlers, how it continues to shape us, and how we, too, shape the land. We honor this place, hoping to redeem some of it’s painful history of exploitation, though we are creating only a glimpse of our wonderful home. It is an offering of thanksgiving for our lives here.
Marsha Stone, on the making of the San Juan Ridge Tapestries
When I met Marsha Stone, the San Juan Ridge Tapestry Project visionary, I knew I wanted to make a film about her community textile project. Through a circuitous route, I had come to meet this community first-hand after hearing tale of this innovative group of urban refugees through Annie Greensfelder, an old friend from Vermont, whom grew up on the Ridge in the 1970's.
Completed in 2022, the San Juan Ridge Tapestry Project is a contemporary example of traditional women’s handwork that has frequently, and often subversively, documented community life, political upheaval, and the natural world through thread. Initially inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry, the ambition, scale, and cultural significance of this project embodies the ethos of the back-to-the-land community that arrived in California’s Sierra Mountains in the 1960s. Their stories, stitched in wool on linen, narrate the community’s history, voice ecological and political concerns, chronicle the bioregion’s flora and fauna, and celebrate the communal nature of their existence; likewise, the tapestries offer a blueprint for sustainable futures.
For close to sixteen years, hundreds of volunteers stitched twelve distinct embroidered panels measuring in total eighty-four feet. The creative effort to bring the tapestries to fruition exemplifies the ideals of collective action which has enabled the community to persist through numerous challenges including their fight against the resurgence of gold mining, the damming of the Yuba river, denuding of old growth forests and wildfire. Underlying their story as settlers is their commitment to the stewardship of the land and acknowledgement of contemporary Indigenous peoples.
The film explores the tapestries through an ethnographic lens informed by years of conversation with residents of the ridge and project leads—founder Marsha Stone, lead embroiderer Mary Moore, and designer Jennifer Rain Crosby. Marsha Stone’s trust in my initial concept of the vision for a film is one of the treasures of my artistic career. Through lush images and aural histories the film creates a thirteenth tapestry, weaving together the unique collective culture of the San Juan Ridge, skillful rendering in thread, and the poetic dynamism of storytelling. Since 2016 it has been my great pleasure and honor to visit and talk with members of the San Juan Ridge community, to get to know the amazing women who envisioned and led this project to fruition, many of the community participants, and to record their stories in The Stitchers.










