German’s summer and fall

German’s Summer and Fall is a small textile book about learning a language together with my son. At the time, he was acquiring speech as a young child, while I was learning German as an adult in a foreign-language environment. We were at very different ages, but in a strangely similar position: both of us were building a world through words that were still new, unstable, and not fully ours.

The book is made of fabric and hand embroidery. This choice of material connects language learning with touch, repetition, slowness, and care. Embroidery resembles the process of acquiring language: stitch by stitch, word by word, something fragile becomes visible. Mistakes, pauses, and irregularities are not hidden; they remain part of the surface.

The title refers to a shared season of language formation. Summer and fall become not only times of the year, but stages of speech: the warmth of first recognition, the melancholy of transition, the gradual accumulation of words, sounds, and meanings. The child’s language grows naturally and quickly, while the adult’s language is marked by memory, effort, accent, and self-consciousness.

For me, the book is also about motherhood in migration. It reflects the strange intimacy of learning beside a child: explaining the world to someone while still lacking stable words for that world oneself. The project looks at language not as a completed system, but as a shared, domestic, bodily process — something learned through daily gestures, repetition, tenderness, frustration, and play.

German’s Summer and Fall is a book about two forms of beginning: a child entering language for the first time, and an adult entering a new language after the loss of linguistic certainty.

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Fabric, hand embroidery, 13 × 13 cm, 2025