Looking for an answer to the question “What is beauty made of?” Christina Sharpe formulates: “Attentiveness whenever possible to a kind of aesthetic that escapes 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:
My mother made me a purple gingham dress with purple and lilac and blue appliqué tulips. She tried, over many summers, to teach me how to sew: needlepoint, appliqué, cross-stitch, slip stitch. She failed. We failed together. She had a beautiful old pedal-operated Singer sewing machine and when you opened the shallow drawers that ran along the top they were filled with brightly colored and differently weighted needlepoint yarn. I used to love to look at them. I would arrange and disarrange them, stack her thimbles, disturb her order.
When she was dying, my mother still made Christmas ornaments by hand. It was a shock on re-encountering the red felt hearts with the straight pins holding them together, the black, felt globe with its own arrangement of pins—the ordinary flat-headed pins, the round red and white and brown heads. My mother’s symmetry: even the bent pins have a place. It was a shock to encounter them again—the way that beauty shocks. But more. What is beauty made of? Attentiveness whenever possible to a kind of aesthetic that escaped violence whenever possible—even if it is only the perfect arrangement of pins.
The scholar’s view of such “female expertise” is revealing: it is not just useful practical skills, but a language of beauty that is passed down through generations. In this project, I am going to explore the usage of needlework and textiles in art, which, in its turn, focus on the connections between 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.
One of the ways to assess such a technique is to look at textiles as an alternative method of text creation. 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 crucial 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.
There are two very different artists who come from divergent contexts that I would like to focus on. The first 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/Soviet Neo Avantguard poet Anna Alchuk, with her visual poetic cycle “Простейшие” (“Protozoa”)
Before turning to the analysis of their works, I will first touch on the theoretic premises I am willing to develop in this work. Among the various pieces of art that identify as or can be identified as feminist, I see two main vectors that organize the field: the feminist art of resistance and the feminist art of persistence. I borrowed this dichotomy from biology; it refers to different ways of microbes’ fighting with antibiotics. To put it in simple terms, “antibiotic resistance is when microbes overcome the effects of antibiotics through a genetic change. <...> Resistant microbes are able to grow even in the presence of the drug”. Antibiotic persistence, in its turn, is “when a subpopulation of microbes escapes the effects of antibiotics by … stopping growth. Typically, this means that persisters stop cell division and thereby the processes involved in preparation for division <...> These non-growing bacteria that survive antibiotics are called persisters” (Sargen). I do not fully copy the same mechanisms from biology. Under the vector of feminist art of resistance I understand such art that more or less directly fights with patriarchy, usually appropriating the same tactics of power and directing it against itself. Under the vector of feminist art of persistence, I understand such art that seeks more or less autonomous existence outside the patriarchal order. Such art does not aim to actively reverse patriarchal rhetoric, but rather represents persistence in an autonomous existence, independent of violent discourses.
Both works by Adama Delphine Fawundu and Anna Alchuk, as I see it, tend towards the second vector, the feminist art of persistence. By referring to traditionally labeled as “female” practices, namely, needlework and textiles, these works, rather than directly interacting with patriarchal order, strive to find alternative and autonomous artistic languages. Let us look more closely at the two artists and their works.
Adama Delphine Fawundu
is Sierra Leonean-American multi-disciplinary visual artist born in 1971 in Brooklyn, NY. Having started as a photographer, she then made a shift to working with multiple media and techniques, including video, textiles, assemblage, sound, and others.
Her project
For Mama Adama Hymns & Parables is a “spiritual conversation,” as the artist puts it, between her grandmother and herself. As an artist, she consciously takes artifacts that were not previously considered art and includes them into the professional artistic context of museums and exhibitions. The main material the artist uses in this project are her grandmother’s fabrics that she transforms through working with printing, photography, and needlework. Among other materials there are “Paper made from Indigenous Kala Cotton from India, Banana Paper from Brazil, Guinea Brocade, Raffia, Cowrie Shells from Sierra Leone, Spanish Moss from Savannah, Cotton from South Carolina, Healing Herbs from Ghana, Copper, Artist Hair, synthetic hair” (Fawundu). Adama Delphine Fawundu incorporates her grandmother’s fabrics into a broader geographical and material context, weaving in it artifacts from Latin America, North America, Asia, and Africa. She then weaves her hair into fabric.
Both fabric and hair in Fawundu’s works are materials that link the artist’s life to other lives and bodies of her family. Grandmother’s clothes, as the artist herself mentioned it at our class Vision and Difference taught by Professor Marianne Hirsch, is not merely a piece of fabric: it is clothes that still have the sweat of both the artist's grandmother and mother who were wearing them. Similarly, artist’s hair contain genetic information and “extend” the bodies of previous generations in the present. However, important is not only what materials does Fawundu use in her art, but precisely how she interacts with them. It would be compelling to look at these works keeping in mind Barthes’ idea of punctum. In Camera Lucida, the scholar introduces two phenomena that organize our perception of photographs. The first is studium, an “application to a thing, taste for someone, a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment…” (Barthes: 26). The second element, punctum, “breakes (or punctuates) the studium”:
It is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument: the word suits me all the better in that it also refers to the notion of punctuation, and because the photographs I am speaking of are in effect punctuated, sometimes even speckled with these sensitive points; precisely, these marks, these wounds are so many points. This second element which will disturb the studium I shall therefore call punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole – and also a cast of the dice. A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me). (Barthes: 26-27)
In Pleasure Erased. Clitoris Unthought (2020), a contemporary French philosopher Catherine Malabou criticizes the duality proposed by Barthes. She explores the notion of “clitoridian pleasure,” which seeks to avoid the “studium-punctum duality” (Malabou: 118). As the philosopher writes, this duality is connected to the dichotomy of passive/active, with its frequent consequences such as virility. She continues:
“Clitoridian pleasure is not the effect of piercing, penetration, or stabbing. <...> Pleasure sits between studium and punctum, in their caesura; it is neither one nor the other. The clitoris, like the feminine, relates to power but is not a power relation” (Malabou: 118-119).
I find this idea fruitful for the current project because in Barthes’ work, the detail referred to as “punctum” indeed pierces suddenly and without warning, taking hold of the viewer, and in most cases causing discomfort. At the same time, this puncture attracts the viewer's gaze and brings a certain kind of pleasure. Although one could argue against reducing the dichotomy of studium-punctum to a sexual, phallic interpretation, I believe that the potential for violent pleasure inherent in it is something worth trying to move away from.
Fawundu’s works present an artistic phenomenon almost completely opposite to what Barthes called punctum. Nothing punctures or penetrates viewers in Fawundu’s works, but rather envelopes their gaze. Enveloping, surrounding a viewer with care, with a healing memory, and not pricking/wounding is what lies behind her artistic practice. It is especially obvious when we see how these pieces of art were exhibited:
The objects are placed not on the walls, as usually paintings are presented, but across the whole space of the exhibition, fluttering and creating a sense of continuity. Such continuity of fabrics reflects the continuity of generations, as well as geographical continuity of cultures and languages, that are the essence of Fawundu’s artistic practice.
The mechanism of enveloping the gaze instead of piercing it lies behind another work, a visual poetic cycle “Простейшие” (Protozoa), authored by Anna Alchuk.
Anna Alchuk
was born in 1955 in Sakhalin Oblast and then moved to Moscow. She was a Russian Jewish poet, a visual artist, a critic, an organizer of politically informed artistic exhibitions, such as “Watch Out: Religion”, which, eventually, resulted in her emigration to Berlin. Her poetry could be labeled as “Neo Avantgarde,” and the poetic cycle “Простейшие” (Protozoa, 1988) can be considered the pinnacle of her poetic experiments with visuality:
Each poem from the cycle occupies one page and consists of only one cyrillic letter repeated across the whole page. A letter forms a pattern that resembles textile patterns and evoques the association with knitting, a traditionally female practice. The intersection of texts and textiles is also reminiscent of Barthes’ “eloquent description of the shared etymological roots of textiles and texts (from the Latin texere—to weave) as ‘at once interwoven and unfinished’” (Bryan-Wilson: 4). The birth of language is the focus of the poems. Calling her cycle after the name of single-celled eukaryotes, Alchuk replicates the mechanisms of how the simplest organisms (here a letter) form sophisticated systems (here the worlds of languages).
Alchuk focuses on the phase that precedes the very moment of language creation. The textile pattern we observe goes before the acquisition of language, which, according to Lacan, happens during the mirror stage:
It suffices to understand the mirror stage in this context as an identification, in the full sense analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes [assume] an image – an image that is seemingly predestined to have an effect at this phase, as witnessed by the use in analytic theory of antiquity’s term, “imago.”
The jubilant assumption [assomption] of his specular image by the kind of being – still trapped in his motor impotence and nursing dependence – the little man is at the infans stage thus seems to me to manifest in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I s precipitated in a primordial form, prior to being objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject. (Lacan: 76)
The language acquisition also means transition from the imaginary, pre–linguistic state, to the formation of symbolic order. Interestingly, Alchuk is trying to capture the “language before language.” The poems from this poetic cycle are not determined by already existing culture, specifically, by literary male tradition. Looking at Alchuk’s search for an autonomous language not dependent on patriarchal order, we could suppose that one of the possible ways to find it is to go back to the pre-symbolic state, to the simplest biological formations.
What is said about Alchuk is also relevant for Adama Delphine Fawundu’s works. The latter avoids constructing a certain linguistic narrative, she does not have signs (in a broad, semiotic, sense). Instead, she completely relies on the materiality of the world. Thus, both artists capture the moment that precedes the acquisition of language, claiming it as their own language, whose existence is marked by the absence of strict hierarchies and of rigid structures. They are replaced by the enveloping, caring gaze, resulting from the emphasis on the role of maternity, extremely material in the both artists’ oeuvres.
As in Fawundu’s works, the connection between generations is implicitly present in Alchuk’s poetry. Repeating one letter, that is how parents usually teach their children to read and to write. An “embroidered alphabet book page,” another way of looking at Alchuk’s cycle, is very representative of the practice of teaching language to a child. At the same time, the process of teaching a human language is inextricably linked in these works with the process of learning the language of nature.
“Mother Nature” is not just a metaphor for the artists under discussion. Maternity, again, is material in both cases. Adama Delphine Fawundu actively engages with organic materials that the Earth provides her with. Moss, for instance, is not less important than hair, shells are not less important than paper or fabric, organic materials obtained through human labor. The body, particularly, a female body, is an intrinsic part of nature, and, as nature does, it is not discontinuous, but, on the contrary, it extends the time and the space in itself.
Anna Alchuk turns to biological elements, single celled organisms Protozoa. The Russian name for these organisms can be translated as “the simplest”, which very often presupposes that they are so simple that they do not deserve the attention of humans. Yet, Alchuk places them in the center of our attention demonstrating that even the simplest elements can become laid the foundations of complex structures. So are the letters and the needlework. Traditionally, letters are treated seriously, as a piece of art, only when they form words, which, in their turn, form more complex systems, such as propositions and text. But Alchuk shows that a repeated letter is already text, and that usually attributed as “female,” textiles are less significant than literary texts created by “great male writers.”
Being the most sophisticated organism on the planet, a human body, these women artist in their works care about the most basic everyday materials or the simplest biological organisms, and includes them into their essences. Enveloping living and non-living creatures with their look, Adama Delphine Fawundu and Anna Alchuk create spaces equal for different elements of the world, found in different times, places, and possessing different tongues.
