Thinking through the Fabric of Life: Textiles, Text and Texture

Solveigh Goett MA - April 2006

“Pick up 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 face of her listeners. It’s the mix of domestic image and mass bloodshed that does it to them…”

Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

texere = weaving

“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.”

The Red Shoes, retold by Clarissa Pinkola Estés (1992)

“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

Stuff the world

"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, Cloth and Human Experience

19171933

19451943

Unspeakable Memories

Stones in Sheep’s Clothes

‘To embroider’ in the figurative sense, of course, means to take a characteristically feminine though permissible licence with the facts.

Marius Kwint, The Physical Past

“Events must link together like the yarn of a sweater.”

Louise Bourgeois

Invisible Memories

The Role of Everyday Textiles in the Narration of the Self

A practice-based study of memory and identity issues

Aims

• Research the circumstances of how particular textile items become signifiers

• Look at the issues they 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

19531963

19651967

Willi Gött, 1919 - 1992 (2005) - a life story told by the daughter through objects and images: a small suitcase contains photographs and textiles left by the late Willi Gött and a photographic album with edited father images.

Etica y Etiqueta (2004) - textile pieces made in response to a story of family conflict surfacing in the context of the Spanish Civil War; focusing on the space between the domestic,‘the tablecloth’, and academia, ‘the book’.

Family Settings (2005) - a memorial made from fragments of table linen containing photographs of family rituals around the tablecloth. Six double-side napkins open to reveal dimensions beyond the familiar surface.

Family Settings

Domestic turbulence

this is not a toy

The End