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Textile Routes

1. things I have been told about textile

I have been told that textiles have magical power to enrich life and expand space.

I have been told that one can explore ideas and the meaning of ideas through making textiles and by referencing the cultural history, the historical qualities and the materiality of textile.

I have been told that for most people in the Middle East a piece of material is everything. It is what you carry with you everywhere, like a nomad. It is your personal tent in some ways. It protects you from everything. You can wrap up, you can sleep on the sand. It has many, many purposes, a large material that also doesn’t take much space. You can carry it in one hand.

I have been told that god was a tailor who cut the human figure out of cloth and breathed life into it.

I have been told that textiles now can be found inside human bodies as spare parts, they can be found for water filtration and they can be used for geo-textiles, space technology.

I have been told that tribal textiles contain memories of other times. In Afghanistan there are textiles containing the pattern of the sea. In Afghanistan you don’t find the sea but some of the textile patterns are evocative of the sea.

I have been told that the inside of the garment sits so closely to our being, so incredibly intimately, that memory is held in those garments and that we can’t wash it off.

I have been told that we are born unclothed and we finish life naked and the textiles that wrap our body become our identity between those two landmarks.

I have been told it is a sense of touch above all else; that is what the pleasure of textiles is. It is why textiles are the part of material culture with which we have a most intimate relationship, because of course we can wear textiles next to the skin, we sleep covered in textiles and so on.

I have been told that colour is very important. It is possible to touch the colour in a sense, because very bright red will work on expectation and somehow you will feel that colour will bring some warmth.

I have been told that a child licked bits of red ribbon for quite a long time, giving a very good lipstick - it came over the edges of the lips a bit, but it was good.

I have been told that there is very often an erotic connection to the sound of certain textiles, the sound they make when people are walking; expensive textiles especially make a more beautiful sound. Some people see textiles through the sound rather than through the colour for example, or through the weave.

I have been told that the most beautiful sound in the world is a taut piece of cloth stretched on an embroidery frame with a linen thread being pulled through and you get that kind of ‘chch’. The sound is just beautiful.

I have been told textiles give us dignity. Textiles cover us, protect us but also we can decide how much we want to reveal of ourselves. How much we show of ourselves, how much we let go, how much we want to be expressing our character truly or to what degree we decide to play a role. Textiles allow all that.i

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I say that textiles form the fabric of our lives, from cradle to grave, mediating our earliest experiences and allowing us access to distant cultural roots and long forgotten personal memories. Yet their material familiarity causes them to ‘disappear’ into the integrated texture of our daily existence.

2. The medium is the message

‘Cloth is the universal free element. It doesn’t have to explain itself. It performs.ii’

The emergence of what could be considered ‘global’ artistic practice has not necessarily facilitated cross-cultural understanding. However, it seems that cloth provides a continuous undercurrent between cultures; it is both common to all cultures and culture-specific. Textile has a social, political and utilitarian history; it is a shared activity moving across and between continents and peoples. It is a language of materiality, a textile ‘diaspora’, linking practitioners in different cultures, as evidenced in their approaches and practiceiii. In ‘Cloth and Human Experience’ Jane Schneider and Annette B. Weiner describe the range of symbolic and economic roles attributed to cloth as reflecting more than the labour invested in its production, citing “The connections of its threads and weaving patterns with ancestral or mythical knowledge.”iv Cloth holds the memory of our time and connects us with memories of other times and other places. “Once a man came with a textile and it was very abstract, with yellow, brown and green silk embroidered triangles. It was a wedding cloak made by the tribe in the mountains who, maybe a thousand years ago, came from the lower area of China and moved to the mountain. In the lower area of China there are rice fields, so the pattern is like a memory of the rice fields that they still keep. They don’t know it, but there still is a memory, and when the sun is shining on the textile it’s very evocative.v”

The term ‘textile’ is a huge term, like a vast sheet billowing in the wind, never still, changing form as it covers or wraps itself around first one element then another, yet always retaining its essential familiarity. Textile, by its very nature, its daily use, remains recognisable even when placed within an unfamiliar physical, aesthetic or intellectual context. And, although different cultures may invest different meaning in textile generally, or particularly, that recognition also contains the understanding of the embedded narrative of making and use. This natural progression of cross-cultural exchange and absorption has been a continuous influence upon the production, use and understanding of textiles.

Contemporary textile practice can be seen as an actual and virtual membrane, upon which there is the drawing out of connection and the defining of difference.

It is interesting that Ingunn Skogholt, when discussing the difficulty in translating the title of her work ‘Forgreninger I, II, and III’, described Forgreninger as ”something that divides/separates like one branch of a tree splitting into several branches, but still belonging to the same root.”vi In this she was defining the links between the tapestries in her triptych, however this description could equally well characterize contemporary textile practice. This practice moves across the directly referenced traditional approach, for example quilting or tapestry, and engages with highly conceptual or performance based installations. Historically tapestry and narrative have been inextricable interlinked, and narrative is central to the work in this exhibition. That narrative is explicit through re-engagement with the tradition of tapestry, or implicit through the mutual understanding between artist and viewer of the inherent narrative characteristics of cloth. Since the 1960’s discourse around the language of materials and processes has enabled an examination of political awareness and cultural relevance through textiles and textile related outcomes. This constant interrogation of the metaphor and materiality of cloth, through the making process, creates potent trans-national and cross-cultural connections.

That external debate has been mirrored by internal dialogue, one directly concerning the body, in which textile may refer to the experience of the interior through an external material examination or description of space outside the body. This different mode of spatial description requires an active engagement of the imagination on the part of the viewer in the determining of boundaries. Anniken Amundsen uses monofilament, a wayward fibre that springs and curls with a life of its own. Her work is installed such a way that it requires careful positioning of the viewer’s own body in relation to the body of the work in space. The work and its material presence heightens awareness of our particular physicality and its limits, reflecting back the underlying concerns of the artist. In this way textile offers not an end point, but a shifting and interactive narrative between the maker, the viewer and the context in which it is seen.

3. Haptic Memories

‘Our bodies are always in contact with cloth, it has sensory and suggestive powers, which can stir both conscious and unconscious memory.vii’

The clothes we wear are redolent of our presence, impregnated by the bodily experience of the wearer and of the maker. The empty garment is an icon of absence and death. Trace elements, stains, history of use, history of making: these elements and more, mean that clothing serves as a powerful metaphor for experience. “To deal with absences - in art or life - entails most of all the recollection of formerly existing and now absent presences: the matrix of memory, inescapably, commences to pulse.”viii The washed and neatly stacked clothing in Kari Steihaug’s work ‘White Madonna 4/7’ are like so many nameless lives, loves, losses. Handed on and handed down, knitted, used, washed, dried, folded, stacked, used, washed and folded again. “These habitual female proceedings, repetitive and monotonous, are…… women’s customary activities for coping with – absences.”ix The act of washing removes the stains, the water performing the role, as it does in ritual acts throughout the world, of a purifying agent. However, the more these garments are washed, the more the fibres lock around each other, embedding the memory of the wearer, the washer, the maker, deeper and deeper into the fabric.

The cloth we make holds the tacit memory of the maker. Through the making of her tapestries Ingunn Skogholt constructs an almost reverse archaeology. The original source - natural form - is drawn, torn up, collaged, photographed, projected, re-drawn and woven. Memory is simultaneously buried and re-formed within the fabric through the act of weaving. For Serbian artist Maja Bajevic in her collaborative piece ‘Under Construction’, memory is woven into the work, the memories that could not be spoken by the makers. She is using the ritual processes of making textile as an act of catharsis and repairx. With the death of her parents, the great Japanese textile artist Chiyoko Tanaka began to make a series of kesa textile works as a form of layering memory as she layered the fabric. The kesa garment is made up of pieces of used cloth, traditionally soiled or discarded rags, stitched together in a particular format. The making of a kesa, a garment associated with Buddhist priests, is an act of devotion in itself. The stitched quilting needs careful concentration, while prayers (or mantras) are quietly repeated at each stagexi. For Tanaka, the fact that the scraps of fabric have once been worn, used, and therefore contained the trace elements, the accretion of memory, of the wearer, the owner, imbued the fabric with additional meaningxii.

The cloth we use holds the memory of our touch and the memory of its use. The architect Toyo Ito asks: “Wasn’t the 20 th century a period in which the domain of vision was gradually expanded until we fooled ourselves into assuming that we had actually touched an object directly, although we had only touched it with the sense of sight?”xiii We engage with the world through touch, rather than merely encounter it in terms of vision alone. The cultural historian Paul Rodaway suggests that to lose the ability to touch is to lose all sense of being in the world, and fundamentally of being at allxiv. Tactile perception and material presence, that physical connection with cloth which “profoundly engages the hand and eye”xv is essential in this time of separation between actual and virtual. The sensation of the cloth between our fingers connects us to the narrative of use.

4. Occupied territory

The fact is, for the man of high culture, linen is uncomfortable.xvi’

As linen may irritate a sensitive skin, textile art is uncomfortable for those with preconceptions concerning cultural territories. Resonances with craft skills, domesticity, functionalism, and repetitive labour: all serve to locate the textile outcomes within an arena of the artisan rather than the artist. Much has been written about the ‘edginess’ of textile art, its position of “belonging by not belonging,”xvii moving between high culture and low culture, art and craft, function and non-function. This essential fluidity of textiles, not entirely one thing or another, disturbs certainties and shifts perceptions. It also acts as a means of communication between cultures, leading to a consideration of the fluid state of trans-culturalism. However, the commonality of material and language can also be the location of difference, as the same piece of cloth can be a functional fabric, a fashion accessory or a sacred garment, depending on the context. In this way textile art also provides the location of discomfort: “A well developed cultural identity includes the strong feeling that specific artistic expression make us the people we want to be, and, at the same time, that other expressions disturb our lives, don’t belong to who we are or make us feel less comfortable.”xviii

It is incumbent upon any art form to develop its own tensions, and its tensile nature provides much of its excitement and interest. Textile art comes with its own inner tensions as a result of its “undecidable”xix location. It can also function as a breeding ground of viral intrusion, emerging through the cracks in the firewalls of certainty. However, rather than diffusing the energies inherent in the art form, this actually provides a continuing dynamic derived from the movement between tradition and innovation.

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I have been told many things about textile: of its diversity of meaning and association, of its importance in crossing boundaries, of its provision of hospitality for a variety of interpretations and hybrid energies.

What I know about textile is that it is the material, the medium in which to be working. Anni Albers wrote, inspiringly: ‘How do we choose our specific material, our means of communication? Accidentally. Something speaks to us, a sound, touch, hardness, softness, it catches us and asks us to be formed. We are finding our language, and as we go along we learn to obey (its) rules and limits…….Students worry about choosing their way. I always tell them “You can go anywhere from anywhere.”xx

© Lesley Millar March 2006

Lesley Millar is Professor in Contemporary Craft Practice at the  University College for the Creative Arts at Canterbury, Epsom, Farnham, Maidstone and Rochester, UK.