Thinking through the Fabric of Life: Textiles, Text and Texture
Solveigh Goett MA – Textile Artist and Researcher
April 2006-04-26
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Knitting History
Unravelling blue hand knitting with the word ‘history’ stitched on
Quote:
"Pick any strand and snip, and history becomes unravelled. This is how Tony begins one of her more convoluted lectures, the one on the dynamics of spontaneous massacres. The metaphor is of weaving or else of knitting, and of sewing scissors. She likes using it: she likes the faint shock on the faces of her listeners. It's the mix of domestic image and mass bloodshed that does it to them…"
Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride[1]
I work with textiles and am particularly interested in textile narratives. I collect textile stories and items and make textile objects and installations.
My research is practice-based and develops through interplay between a traditional academic approach in writing interwoven with thinking through the hands making visual and tactual propositions. My presentation therefore has three layers that relate to each other - words, images and textile objects.
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TEXERE = WEAVING
Weaving Paper
Weft of found papers – till receipts, school newsletter, newspaper, sweet wrappers, cigarette paper etc – interwoven with yarn from an unravelled jumper on a warp of string
Text and textiles are related, as words and as concepts. Both come from the same Latin root. Both tell stories. Long before the time of television and radio, long before the time of books and print, there were stories being told while textiles were made. The spinning of yarns and the weaving of tales bear witness to a relationship that has been fundamental in the making of the fabric of life.
There are tales of magic carpets and bags, invisibility cloaks and patchwork gowns. Here fragments are collected to be joined in the material manifestation of a desire.
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The Red Shoes
Girl’s shoes, fabric scraps
“Once there was a poor motherless child who had no shoes. But the child saved cloth scraps wherever she found them and over time sewed herself a pair of red shoes. They were crude but she loved them. They made her feel rich even though her days were spent gathering food in the thorny woods until far past dark.”[2]
Narratives and textiles are both about making connections. Probably the oldest human craft of making material connections was textiles, a crucial step in the history of humanity according to Elizabeth Wayland Barber in her survey of the first 20,000 years of women’s history:
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Web of Life
Collage of nets on web
Quote:
“Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.”
Chief Seattle[3]
"The discovery of twisting fibre into string … opened the door to an enormous array of new ways to save labor and improve the odds of survival... Soft flexible thread …is a necessary prerequisite to making woven cloth. On a far more basic level, string can be used simply to tie things up - to catch, to hold, to carry. From these notions come snares and fishlines, tethers and leashes, carrying nets, handles, and packages, not to mention a way of binding objects together to form more complex tools. (…) So powerful, in fact, is simple string in taming the world to human will and ingenuity that I suspect it to be the unseen weapon that allowed the human race to conquer the earth, that enabled us to move out into every econiche on the globe during the Upper Palaeolithic. We should call it the String Revolution."[4]
The making of textiles is a good example for ’thinking through the hands’, exploring structures, links, patterns, forces and interfaces in the making. The fabrication of cloth, through plaiting, weaving, braiding, knotting, netting or knitting, as M.H. Kalhlenberg points out,
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Blue Map
Machine embroidery on interior fabric
“requires a combination of manual dexterity and mental application. The production of non-woven fabrics, like the more complex loom-woven textiles to follow, also requires two strands of material, one crossing over the other at right angles. This is a binary activity, a repetitive motion of over and under, with threads at the front moving to the back, and then forward again. ….. Such activity constitutes memory, perhaps our first physical evidence of the human capacity for binary thinking. Binary motion and memory are very different from linear forms such as writing, but not dissimilar to the electronic codes of ones and zeros … in today's computers."[5]
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Stuff the World
Felt ball, horse hair and other stuffing
‘Zeros and Ones’ is the title of Sadie Plant’s book where she develops these links within a discourse of cybernetic cultural research. She says:
"The yarn is neither metaphorical nor literal, but quite simply material, a gathering of threads which twist and turn through the history of computing, technology, the sciences and arts. In and out of the punched holes of automated looms, up and down through the ages of spinning and weaving, back and forth through the fabrication of fabrics, shuttles and looms, cotton and silk, canvas and paper, brushes and pens, typewriters, carriages, telephone wires, synthetic fibres, electric filaments, silicon strands, fiber-optic cables, pixeled screens, telecom lines, the World Wide Web, the net, and matrixes to come."[6]
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doll under rug
detail of The Red Carpet
rag rug made from red fabric strips with found objects
Back from the World Wide Web closer to home where cloth is literally our second skin. To appreciate just how important textiles are in everyday life, try to visualize your home without textiles. No clothes, no sofa, no curtains, carpets or cushions, no bed linen, blankets or mattress, no towels, no socks, no knickers, no mop. Books and paintings disintegrating, the very building crumbling as membranes, linings, roof felt and underlay disappear, strings, cables and networks unravel, the fabric of life literally dissolving.
And between the virtual reality of new technologies and the intimate space surrounding our body, textiles define political and religious identities as well as economical structures and hierarchies.
Lynda Morris states that
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Red Banners
Silk and tooth picks on calico
“The study of the history of textiles is central to the study of capitalism and Marxism, it links labour to women’s issues, slavery and child labour, colonialism with international trade, and the development of mechanical engineering with social engineering.”[7]
These are issues arising from the making of textiles, the physical structure of the fabric, but there is also the potential of the surface to communicate through pattern, colour, signs and symbols.
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Small flags
Detail from Embroidering the Truth
Mixed textile media on rice sack
Quote:
"People under capitalism continue to mark sacred and ceremonial moments with banners, hangings, shrouds and robes….notwithstanding the spread of capitalism, political and religious elites still depend upon cloth to mobilize human emotions in support of such large-scale institutions as the nation state. Flags and military uniforms are two powerful examples."
Annette B. Weiner & Jane Schneider
To quote Annette Weiner,
"People under capitalism continue to mark sacred and ceremonial moments with banners, hangings, shrouds and robes….notwithstanding the spread of capitalism, political and religious elites still depend upon cloth to mobilize human emotions in support of such large-scale institutions as the nation state. Flags and military uniforms are two powerful examples."[8]
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German Uniforms 1917 – 1945
Four B&W family photographs
And think of images of prisoners in concentration camps in their striped suits with a yellow star or a pink triangle stitched on, and the orange jump suits and hoods of Guantanamo Bay, and how they portray power relationships through textiles.
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Unspeakable memories
Puppet, doll’s deckchair and other found objects
Less visible, but equally important, textiles have been used through the ages to pass on messages hidden among patterns and embellishments. Mary Queen of Scots, women in Chile under military dictatorship, British women in Japanese prisoners of war camps and Palestinian women under occupation have - as many others - relied on the fact that textile work tends to be considered as too trivial to pose a threat and warrant close examination.
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Stones in Sheep’s clothes
Pebbles and felted wool
To summarize:
Textiles accompany us on the journey through life: we are wrapped as soon as we enter the world and covered when we leave. Textiles are markers of time, means of expression, tools of communication, and thus provide touching points between worlds: of self and other, maker and user, private and public, matter and spirit.
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Embroidering the Truth
Mixed media wall piece
Quote:
“‘To embroider’ in the figurative sense, of course, means to take a characteristically feminine though permissible licence with the facts.”[9]
In the 21st century, the spin doctor rather than the miller's daughter is spinning straw into gold. We form networks, visit web sites and surf the net. But as ever, we pull strings and tie knots, follow patterns and embroider the truth. The language of textiles is everywhere, from close knitted communities to mathematical and philosophical concepts such as ‘Quine’s fabric’, from the apron strings of the domestic sphere to the Iron Curtain and Velvet Revolution of politics. It is a universal language that we all understand.
To quote Dorothy Jones:
“As a material and cultural resource cloth continues to provide potent textual metaphors while often serving as a text itself. It can symbolise social cohesion, the construction of national and personal identities and the processes of artistic creation, while writers of various kinds continue to draw upon it for inspiration.” [10]
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Like the Yarn of a Sweater
Doll’s jumper
Quote:
“Events must link together like the yarn of a sweater.”
Louise Bourgeois[11]
As a textile artist I can therefore draw on a vast pool of tacit knowledge based on direct perceptual experience. I can use this tacit knowledge as a source of reference to develop a textile language beyond the purely visual that aims to give a material presence to invisible emotions and thought, use, as Kerstin Kraft says, “textile working as physical evidence of abstract knowledge”.[12] The pieces I make record the process as much as the result of thinking through the hands.
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Invisible memories
Net curtain and garters
Textile practice enables me to research identity through processes of making that engage with the hybridity of its subject matter, in a setting where according to Sarat Maharaj “we might think of culture less in terms of a final, enclosing identity, more as an unceasing activity of unmaking and remaking."[13]
My research is set in everyday life. I see myself in the space between the academic and the domestic, between the book and the washing line.
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Hanging up the washing
Family Photograph
As Tim Dant observes,
“Much more of our daily lives is spent in interacting with material objects than interacting with other people…. our contact with objects is often continuous and intimate in comparison with our contact with people.” [14]
Most of these objects are trivial and ordinary, much taken for granted and rarely reflected upon.
Because of the intimate and private nature of everyday textiles, their true personal value is often hidden: asked about favourite possessions, people are more likely to mention their music equipment or a piece of jewellery than a pair of lucky underpants, even though the loss of the latter might cause greater distress.
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Text only:
Project title
My research focuses on the meaning of ordinary textile items in life stories.
The working title of my project is
“The Role of Everyday Textiles in the Narration of the Self: A practice-based study of memory and identity issues”
By everyday textiles I mean ordinary domestic items such as towels, socks, tablecloths, pillowcases, jumpers - items that have no intrinsic value and are not (yet) museum pieces, but are imbued with meaning through personal stories.
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Text only:
Project aims
The aims of my project are to
· Research the circumstances of how particular textile items become signifiers
· Look at the issues they come to represent and why
· Investigate ways textiles can be used specifically to understand and communicate complex issues
· Create a body of textile work to portray the process and results of these investigations
I am still in the initial phase of my research where I allow myself a playful exploration of ideas and materials, making tentative links and layers of meaning in words, images and objects.
I started with my own stories, through family photographs, items and memories.
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Kitchen curtain
Vintage Fabric
The centre of my childhood was the kitchen, a space dominated by my mother, separated from the outside world by the kitchen curtain bearing like traffic signs the symbols of her rule. This curtain has witnessed so many stories, that it is not associated with any particular one, but evokes in me a general feeling of unease and discomfort.
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Kitchen curtain scenes
Family photographs