Con/textures: Textiles, Familial Memory, Mother Tongue
My project focuses on the usage of needlework and textiles in art, which focuses on the familial memory among female generations, materiality, and the tongue a mother gives to her child. In The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine, Rozsika Parker notes:
“When women paint, their work is categorised as homogeneously feminine – but it is acknowledged to be art. When women embroider, it is seen not as art, but entirely as the expression of femininity. And, crucially, it is categorised as craft” (Parker: 4-5).
Much has been changed in contemporary art, and the practice of textiles that was usually labeled “feminine” is now consciously used by many artists, separately or as a part of a bigger art project, into which needlework is incorporated.
Looking for an answer to the question “What is beauty made of?”, Christina Sharpe formulates:
“Attentiveness whenever possible to a kind of aesthetic that escaped violence whenever possible – even if it is only the perfect arrangement of pins.” (Sharpe).
For her, the personification of such beauty was her mother’s home labor, needlework and gardening. Sharpe says: “My mother gifted me a love of beauty, a love of words” (Sharpe). The scholar’s view of such “female expertise” is that it is not just useful practical skills, but a language of beauty that is passed down through generations.
In Weaving the Word. The Metaphorics of Weaving and Female Textual Production, Kathryn Sullivan Kruger argues that
“by participating in the production of textiles—as well as in the community that existed because of that production—women took part in the first textual practices, recording their society’s stories, myths, and sacred beliefs in symbols woven or embroidered on their textiles,” and that “the scene they conveyed constituted society’s first texts” (Sullivan Kruger: 22).
It is important for me to approach the artistic practice of needlework/textiles as a way of acquiring language, or, literally, “mother tongue,” inherited from women of older generations, and as a way of preservation and transmission of familial memory.
Tentatively, I would like to focus on two very different artists and their works. The first one is a Sierra Leonean-American visual artist Adama Delphine Fawundu, with her work “For Mama Adama Hymns & Parables,” and the second one is a Russian Neo Avantguard poet Anna Alchuk, with her visual poetic cycle “Protozoa” (“Простейшие”). I will show examples from both of these works and will try to see how textiles, familial memory, and the birth of the tongue work in the contextures of their art.