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“Flying is woman’s gesture–flying in language and making it fly. We have all learned the art of flying and its numerous techniques; for centuries we’ve been able to possess anything only by flying; we’ve lived in flight, stealing away, finding, when desired, narrow passageways, hidden crossovers. It’s no accident that voler has a double meaning, that it plays on each of them and thus throws off the agents of sense. It’s no accident: women take after birds and robbers just as robbers take after women and birds. They […] fly the coop, take pleasure in jumbling the order of space, in disorienting it, in changing around the furniture, dislocating things and values, breaking them all up, emptying structures, and turning propriety upside down. What woman hasn’t flown/stolen? Who hasn’t felt, dreamt, performed the gesture that jams sociality?”

— Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”

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Filme documentário sobre a Indústria têxtil na Vila de Pevidém, o seu passado e presente, o seu impacto na vida familiar e no próprio seio da vila, e as suas...

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Michael Swaine is a ceramics arts instructor based in San Francisco, California, and a lifelong mender. Once a month Michael travels to San Francisco's needi...

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Textiles have longstanding histories of collective making; there is evidence of collectively produced cloth extending as far back as the Neolithic and early Bronze Ages. As curator M. Anna Fariello observes, “Throughout history and up into the Middle Ages, the making of any object was centered in a cottage industry” (2011: 26). Shared work also strengthens group cohesion and fosters social bonds; today, communities on every continent continue to come together to print, dye, weave, spin, bead, plait, quilt, and sew collectively. What is more, as cultural theorist Milada Burcikova asserts, historically “craft has been a vehicle to think about self-sufficiency, self-empowerment, communal experience and happiness in work, as well as a tool for fighting poverty and oppression” (2011: 8).

“Editorial Crafting Community - Introduction” by KIRSTY ROBERTSON and LISA VINEBAUM in “Textile Journal of Cloth and Culture” (2016, volume 14).

Textiles have always been a catalysts for industrial and political change, weaving as a political action has three major advantages: it has a powerful visual and emotional impact, it directly realizes the self-reliance and generosity promoted by our movement, and it has a sensuous, meditative satisfaction that makes it easy to promote. My project, Common Threads, explores ways to demonstrate and spread interest in hand weaving and “slow” production, along with the True Gift ethos, resulting in a growing community of producers who subscribe to this philosophy and are empowered to engage in real exchange with the world on their terms.

Travis Joseph Meinolf

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To see more of the fascinating Travis Joseph Meinolf’s inspiring project Action Weaver, please visit: http://actionwords.tumblr.com/

As my project for the class I made ‘Social Fabric’, a piece in which I brought my loom to four San Francisco locations (I built a cart for this) and simply wove in public. Passers-by interacted on many levels, many with sideways glances, knowing looks, or a thumbs ups, but also with conversation and real interest. I was weaving simple, white cotton cloth, but as a way of incorporating the interactions into textile I offered for those with a technical interest to choose another color, with which I demonstrated a twill weave, leaving a colorful stripe. After days of weaving on the streets and in parks I took this cloth, and my ‘field notes’, and I began thinking about ways to present the completed object that would successfully communicate the ‘performance’ to those who hadn’t participated. In the end I folded the cloth up like a book, embroidered numbers along it to correspond to the timeline of my notes and typed them up as footnotes to the text, the textile. With an accompanying polaroid showing me at the loom on the street, this package was eventually brought to the attention of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, who have obtained it for their collection.

Travis Joseph Meinolf

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To see more of the fascinating Travis Joseph Meinolf’s inspiring project Action Weaver, please visit: http://actionwords.tumblr.com/

What’s more, today, artists not always associated with craft or textiles such as Ghada Amer, Tracy Emin, Polly Apfelbaum, and Liza Lou, and including those enjoying a great deal of critical acclaim such as Tuttle, Michelle Grabner, Grayson Perry, Jim Drain, Theaster Gates, and William J. O’Brien, are using tapestry, embroidery, knitting, beading, ceramics, wood work and other forms of craft to make work celebrated at the heights of the art world. While we applaud this shift, we surmise that the embrace of craft and fiber stems at least in part from their increasing use by male artists, and we remain cognizant that many important women artists who have spent decades working with fiber materials remain under-recognized.

“Editorial Crafting Community - Introduction” by KIRSTY ROBERTSON and LISA VINEBAUM in “Textile Journal of Cloth and Culture” (2016, volume 14).

We argue that one of the most profound recent developments in the field of contemporary fiber is a substantial shift in site from private space to public space, away from the domestic sphere, and into public sites such as cafés, pubs and bars, storefronts, galleries, public transportation, the streets, and cyberspace. What is more, knitting, sewing, crochet, and even weaving in public spaces is most often undertaken by groups of individuals, marking a parallel shift from away from the individual maker. We contend that these public, collective types of making also have a performative bent, transforming public spaces into shared, dynamic, communal social space. Art historian Alla Myzelev calls this the claiming of public space “for more intimate relations” (2009: 157), reinforcing the notion of textiles as social fabric.

“Editorial Crafting Community - Introduction” by KIRSTY ROBERTSON and LISA VINEBAUM in “Textile Journal of Cloth and Culture” (2016, volume 14).

LISA ANNE AUERBACH

(2016)

“From October 16-November 6, 2016, three details of my sweaters were featured on billboards in Cincinnati, Ohio, as part of The I-71 Project, a billboard exhibition curated by Anne Thompson and Steven Matijcio and presented by the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, in conjunction with the Columbus Museum of Art.

The sweaters were originally made in 2008 for an exhibition of sweaters at the Aspen Art Museum. Each sweater used slogans from both sides of historic presidential campaigns.

"The Times are Sadly Out of Joint" was a song written for the 1876 campaign of Samuel Tilden, a Democrat, who lost to Rutherford Hayes.

"The Stakes are Too High For You to Stay at Home" was part of the famous Daisy ad by Lyndon Johnson's 1964 campaign.

"Let the People Rule" was the slogan both for Andrew Jackson, who campaigned in 1828, and Theodore Roosevelt, in 1912.”

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To see more of Lisa Anne Auerbach’s political knitting, please visit:

http://lisaanneauerbach.com/

”Female Maps”

(2018)

by Carmen Imbach Rigos

size: 70×70×250 cm.

materials: sewing thread, macrame, silk.

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Fabrics, however, could be incorporated into the interior planning far beyond an occasional partition. A museum, to give a large scale example, could set up textile panels instead of rigid ones, to provide for the many subdivisions and backgrounds it needs. Such fabric walls could have varying degrees of transparency or be opaque, even light-reflecting. They could be interchanged easily with changing needs and would bring an intensified note of airiness to a place. In ancient Japanese houses veil-like fabric panels were used to form rooms and to allow the breeze to pass through. (The Japanese movie "Gate of Hell" shows such use in early times.) The essentially structural principles that relate the work of building and weaving could form the basis of a new understanding between the architect and the inventive weaver. New uses of fabrics and new fabrics could result from a collaboration; and textiles, so often no more than an after-thought in planning, might take a place again as a contributing thought.

Anni Albers in “The Pliable Plane: textiles in Architecture” (1957).

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To see the entire text, please visit: https://albersfoundation.org/teaching/anni-albers/texts/#tab4

It is not abundance or sparsity of fabrics though, that may date our interiors. It is as much the way our fabrics are used. Today we have no time for frills: we hang our curtains from ceiling to floor in straight folds. Instead of decorative additaments they thus become an integral architectural element, a counterpart to solid walls. Mies van der Rohe was one of the first to use them in this architectural form. Le Corbusier, in a different way, incorporates textiles into an architectural scheme, using them as enormous flat wall-panels, banners, that carry color and form and serve perhaps also as sound-absorbing flats. Above all they become a focal point, as in the halls of his Indian High Court of Justice at Chandigarh.

Anni Albers in “The Pliable Plane: textiles in Architecture” (1957).

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To see the entire text, please visit: https://albersfoundation.org/teaching/anni-albers/texts/#tab4

In our settled existence the character of mobility in our fabrics is nevertheless manifest: as curtains they are drawn open or closed, letting in light or shutting it out, thereby changing dramatically the appearance of a room. As table mats or tablecloths they are put on and taken off again; as bedspreads they are removed at night. They can be lifted, folded, carried, stored away and exchanged easily; thus they bring a refreshing element of change into the now immobile house. The very fact of mobility makes them the carrier of extra aesthetic values. A red wall may become threatening in the constancy of a high pitch, while red curtains of equal color intensity and able to cover an equal area can be of great vitality and yet not overpowering because the red area can be varied by drawing the curtain. The perishable nature of fabrics, though in many respects a severe disadvantage, turns into an advantage when a red fabric can be replaced by a blue one for instance, more easily than is possible with most other materials. Their perishability is often a welcome reason for change.

Anni Albers in “The Pliable Plane: textiles in Architecture” (1957).

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To see the entire text, please visit: https://albersfoundation.org/teaching/anni-albers/texts/#tab4

In general then, except for some of our clothes, textiles have taken on an indoor existence. Their protective duties have changed. Instead of keeping off the wind, they now may keep the sun from inside the house, and important today in a crowded world, protect the privacy of the inhabitants. They still give warmth, on floors for instance, and may give insulation from drafts as curtains—functions losing importance with improved building conditions. On the other hand they are taking on new tasks like sound- absorption, a problem growing with a noisier world. In fact, we ask of our fabrics more diversified services than ever before. Today we may want them to be light-reflecting, even fluorescent, crease-resistant or permanently pleated and have such invisible qualities as being water-repellent, fast-drying, non-shrinking, dust-shedding, spot-resistant and mildew-proof, to name only a few. We are witnessing today an acceleration of textile progress not even remotely resembling any other in history. Strangely, advances are not due to any improvements in weaving itself, that is to new inventions of thread interlacing. Here we can actually see a regression. The impressive textile development at present is almost entirely due to new chemical processes that bring us new fibers and finishes. In constant succession we find announcements of new textile materials and treatments that ". . . ize" our fabrics, from the already classic "Sanforize" to a surprising "sanitize"—self-explanatory—to an occasional absurdity such as "heavenize" riding the wave of the day's ". . . ize" promises.

Anni Albers in “The Pliable Plane: textiles in Architecture” (1957).

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To see the entire text, please visit: https://albersfoundation.org/teaching/anni-albers/texts/#tab4

If a first need for textiles came with a need for clothing and shelter, the use of these textiles changed with changing needs, with the development of needs. Though they still protect us today against the weather in the form of clothes in our regular settled form of life, they no longer provide us with shelter except in our spells of nomadism, as tourists or warriors. With the discontinuance of this one major function textiles moved indoors, inside our habitations. If we recall the attributes we have given them: insulating, pliable, transportable, relatively lightweight, all of these have been and still are active, as they were outdoors, in the interiors of houses all over the world throughout the centuries. But with their relaxed duties, that is, no longer having to guard our life, they have accumulated more and more functions that belong to another realm—aesthetic functions. These, in time, have moved so much to the foreground that today "decoration" has become for many the first and sometimes only reason for using fabrics. In "decoration" we have an additive that we may well look at, if not skeptically, at least questioningly.

Anni Albers in “The Pliable Plane: textiles in Architecture” (1957).

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To see the entire text, please visit: https://albersfoundation.org/teaching/anni-albers/texts/#tab4

In a life of wandering, not only what is carried has to be portable, but the means for carrying things have to be found and developed. A string that holds a bundle together, or a group of strings forming a net or bag are direct ancestors to our air-luggage today. The textile material, pliable and lightweight, is of utmost efficiency in transit. It is interesting to observe that our carrying cases with a need for decreasing weight in fast travel are becoming again more and more a mere bag of cloth. But from a string or a connected group of strings to a fabric, a long history of inventions passed. In distant history it may well have been the use of hides that challenged the inventive minds to fabricate a counterpart. Through thousands of years of textile experimentation, however, nature's remarkable model still stands unsurpassed in many of its practical aspects. But in the course of development the resulting "fabrics" have taken on characteristics that belong to them alone and which, in turn, perform in various ways better than the original example supplied by nature.

Anni Albers in “The Pliable Plane: textiles in Architecture” (1957).

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To see the entire text, please visit: https://albersfoundation.org/teaching/anni-albers/texts/#tab4

Losing myself is the website dedicated to the omonymous project realised for the Irish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2016.

“Alzheimer's Disease is a form of dementia, one of a range of conditions that progressively degrade the synaptic connections within our brains. The condition erodes the ability to plan and to remember. It becomes gradually harder to situate yourself and to navigate your way in the world: two capacities central to the experience of architecture. We have worked for a decade, designing buildings for people with dementia. Losing Myself is a reflective report on the lessons we have learnt during this experience."

"Losing Myself" is researched, designed and produced collaboratively by Niall McLaughlin and Yeoryia Manolopoulou.

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