Chapter One

The place of craft within the world of art is a dynamic discussion, a long-running debate that I cannot address in full. The very contentiousness of this debate, however, is testament to the complex nature of craft and how it subverts conventional categorization. Crafts spans a vast field of workmanship, techniques, materials, and traditions, and have been perceived by scholars to contribute to, to defy, to lessen, or to remain entirely separate from fine arts. For the purposes of this paper, the distinction of a category of practical domestic arts that temper aesthetic goals with functionality will serve, as simplistic as that may be. Within this category, I will focus specifically on textiles, as a specific, and particularly rich, subset of crafting.

Julia Bryan-Wilson examines textile “not as a singular artistic “medium” but as a field of cultural production or matrix that moves nimbly between high and low.” [1] Indeed, textiles, both along with crafting in general and as a distinct practice, occupy a space of contradiction, are an “elastic weaving together of the registers of high and low” [2] and are “thus also “in the fray” of heated disputes, controversies, and disagreements … often about the limits of boundaries between high and low, since textiles, not least because of their constant use in and affiliation with the everyday, trigger suspicions that such boundaries might not exist.” [3] I hesitate to say that textiles occupy a privileged place in society precisely for these reasons of register; textiles are so ubiquitous across society so as to subvert or perhaps subsume notions of value and significance.

Across cultures and throughout time, textiles are central to human lives. While I will provide a closer examination of the poetic, expressive power of weaving, it is important to note that textiles have held and hold immense economic, ritual, political, and communicative power. Truly, textiles have the “capacity … to mean in multiple directions;” [4] “weaving is meaning in multiple ways.” [5] In their ubiquitous inclusion in both the quotidian and the sacred, the amateur and the professional, the “high” and the “low,” across all strata of society and in civilization throughout time, textile art is a uniquely unifying thread of humanity.

The trans-temporal and transcultural nature of textile appears to extend to a connection between textile and communication, a fundamental relationship between the tactile object and how we understand meaning and documentation. As with texts, Bryan-Wilson posits, there is a contingency to textile practices: “their meanings are conditional, dependent on context, shifting over time, open to rereadings and misreadings … these threads of reception can be difficult to decipher as they tangle, snare, knot, twist, double back, tear, and snap while they stretch between the most elite sites and the most ordinary.” [6] With the capacity to communicate comes both the power of recording and the limits of contextual significance. As “tactile forms of communication or kinds of writing, textiles offer themselves as objects to be understood, but as with any system of language, they are dense with multiple meanings.” [7] Perhaps textile is proto-textual, the tactile representation of culture upon which human life imprints. If so, text would be “embedded in textiles, a line that twists between illegible fiber and signifying utterance.” [8]

Text is indeed embedded in textile in the English language, both words sharing their roots in the Greek texō, Latin texere, meaning “to weave.” In French, the verb “to weave” is tisser, connected to, on the one hand, tissu (fabric), and also textile and le textile. The French texture, it should be noted, can describe both the texture of a cloth or of an oeuvre [9] and trame is at once the weft of a weave and the figurative frame or plot. Not only in Indo-European languages is there a linguistic connection between text and textile: in sacred Quechua, for example, the word for “language” is “thread,” and “embroidering” is used to describe complex conversation. [10] The English language alone abounds with metaphors of weaving and narrative, [11] evidence of the deep connection between understandings of composition, creativity, and narrative structure between the two. The history of weaving appears to be particularly intertwined with not just the textual, but the pre- or proto-textual, as suggested above, in the form of oral traditions. From Sapphic poetry [12] to the French chansons de toile, [13] Scottish waulking songs, [14] or the weaving songs of the Naga people in India and Myanmar, [15] this relation between song and textiles can be found both in historical records and living traditions.

In Western traditions, ancient Greek narrative modes have had an immense impact and, as prominent classicists, such as Gregory Nagy, and craft scholars, like Ellen Harlizius-Klück and Giovanni Fanfani, are researching, textile technology is at the center of this storytelling tradition. Weaving and sewing prove to be insightful metaphors, and even technical terms, for ancient Greek verbal arts. As Fanfani and Harlizius-Klück argue, “investigation into ancient textile technology and the respective terminology may enhance literary interpretation by providing more reliable reconstructions of the material reality on which references to particular crafts (weaving, spinning, plaiting), techniques, or tools are grounded.” [16]

The classical Greek vocabulary for verbal arts abounds with textile-words. “Proemium,” the beginning of a work of verbal art, comes from the Greek prooímion, or “initial threading.” And “hymn,” from humnos, has its roots in the idea of a web, the product of weaving and spinning. [17] The name “Homer” is, as Nagy explains, derived from the noun homēros, meaning “the one who fits/joins together.” Thus, “Homer as the master poet ‘fits together’ pieces of song that are made ready to be parts of an integrated whole just as a master carpenter or joiner ‘fits together’ or ‘joins’ pieces of wood.” [18] Ancient Greek artists and philosophers understood oral poetry as a technique, or craft. As Eustathius wrote, “Homeric poetry, after it had been scattered about and divided into parts, was sewn together by those who sang it, like songs sung into a single fabric.” [19] Pindar wrote similarly that “since the poetry of Homer had not been brought together under one thing, but rather had been scattered about and divided into parts—when they performed it rhapsodically, they would be doing something that is similar to sequencing or sewing, as they produced it into one thing.” [20] This concept of poetic rhapsody or rhaptein is the “principle of integration of threads from an existing weave into a new or next one,” as Harlizius-Klück and Fanfani explain so well. “Threads continue across [the] different structures, each structure providing a series of elements for the other.” [21]

The oral poet is like the weaver sat at the loom, a range of options available within the necessary steps to create a structurally sound weave. The frame of the loom is constant, the warp has been set, and a pattern may already have been chosen. The weaver knows how many weft strands she is weaving with, and while these may change in color or texture, to alter the number would be to alter the whole structure. Each throw of the shuttle adds a new row to the weave; each addition necessitates a subsequent action. So, too, is the poet working within the framework of his tradition. He has at his disposal the characters and stories that he will weave together in his own way. The meter is his warp; the larger mythology is the mechanism of the loom itself. The weaver and the poet are both technicians, using specific tools and techniques to assemble parts into a whole. They are both also artisans inspired by the creative spirit, whether they identify it as Divine inspiration or personal imagination.

As described above, textiles are fundamental to many cultures. Beyond etymology and understandings of story-telling as a kind of craft, weaving itself is a form of narrative building. If words and phrases, rhyme and meter are available to the oral poet to turn into a story, then “these verbal units act like a textile whose sum of elements signifies a culturally relevant product. In this case, the metaphoric intertwining of quotes shows that weaving, almost more than writing, remains inextricably linked to our means of communication, our perception of the physical world in which we live, and our understanding of that which lies beyond words.” [22] Clark deems the textile to be “a super-text,” containing things beyond the capabilities of written script, able to encapsulate “within a small area the totality of cultural cosmovision and the narrative of creation.” [23]

The word “metaphor” itself is part of this generative narrative conception. Metaphor means “to carry beyond,” but what is less known, as Cecilia Vicuña points out, is the root of “phor”: To create is to generate meaning, to carry something from one medium into another. In many traditions, [25] women are the weavers. Whether creating children or textiles, women are a source of metaphor, carrying the quotidian into the sacred and vice versa.

Women weave life, weave protective textiles, and weave together the family and society. Zegher highlights how etymologically “nest derives from ‘net,’” the mesh fabric used to protect, confine, or carry. A meshwork is like the “framework of interwoven flexible sticks and twigs used to make walls, fences, and roofs in which to rear the young. To give birth and to protect the lineage, women need to weave nests into wattle-and-daub shelters.” [26] Weaving is of the female body; the body is a loom and to weave is to give birth. [27]

For the Navajo, the knowledge of weaving is tied to the creation of the world. The deity Spider Woman taught the ancestors to weave by telling them how her husband, Spider Man, constructed a loom from the sky and earth, with a warp of sun rays, heddles of crystals and lightning, a batten of sunshine, and a shell to comb the strings. Though the husband wove the world, it is the wife who translates and transmits the knowledge to humans. A Sioux myth tells of an old woman who lives in a cave, eternally weaving as her dog watches. She never finishes because each time she leaves her weaving to stir the soup that is cooking over the fire, the mischievous dog claws at her textile, undoing it. If and when she does finish, the world will end. [28] The old woman is weaving time and life in her eternal task, representing women, eternal bringers and perpetuators of life.

Athena, Greek goddess of wisdom and war, is a master weaver. When Arachne, a mortal, challenges the gods’ power in both claims of weaving mastery and in the stories she tells in her weaving, Athena punishes her by turning her into a spider, doomed to weave webs for eternity. Arachne’s story is a warning against pride and boastfulness, punishing, in some ways, the elevation of (human) women’s work to celebratory status. Athena, interestingly, is not borne of a woman, but from Zeus’s head [29] after he kills her mother Metis. Metis means both cunning and weaving, two attributes that Athena becomes identified with. And yet, “although she does have a mother incarcerated in her father’s body, and she does have an affinity for the domestic feminine task of weaving,” Athena is really, as Still suggests, “her Father’s daughter, the woman as bearer of the patriarchal system, and thus weaving is done in support of male power.” [30]

This domestic, feminine realm is, in many cultures, where crafting occurs. In this way, women’s art has historically been confined to the domestic realm, to that which exhibits and reinforces a femininity based on utility and domesticity. Indeed, femininity and crafts seemingly occupy a similarly dichotomous space between utility and beauty, between the profane and the sacred. Domestic crafts embue the everyday with beauty, meaning, and history, but not without sacrifice, as Lucy Lacrom captures in her verse: This “the world of women” is at once the burden of the monotonous, unrecognized labor of domestic craft and the transcendence of tradition, a connection, through weaving, of womanhood across time. The craftswoman is haunted by the history of women’s art being undervalued, but, through this, is also connected to a sisterhood joined by shared activity and creativity.

In a world of gendered division, domestic crafts become a tool of order. Order, from the Greek ordo, which is the warping, or threading, of the loom. Women belong to the home, are home for others. If a male-dominated tradition will assume that gendered difference comes from the feminine lack, as Freud does, then textile is not just a gendered tradition but has its very origin in the need for women to cover their genitals, or, rather, lack thereof. [32] Women work at the loom to not just generate, then, but to shield themselves from men. As Still convincingly argues, this “protection” is necessitated by patriarchal fear of women’s sexual power, of their generative capability. “Penelope’s weaving, and unweaving, is only the most famous example of the very act of weaving being used for apotropaic effect,” [33] a common use of weaving in the Greek tradition and beyond.

Penelope is trapped in her own home, obliged to adhere to domestic conventions of hospitality and gendered rules of ownership, and forced into futility as she unweaves her work each night. She is stalling, keeping the suitors at bay until her husband returns and restores order. When Telemachus is coming into his manhood, he asserts himself by sending his mother back to her room and her loom, to let the men discuss. Weaving is both her punishment and her solace, a shield against the danger of the masculine world.

Alternatively, Penelope’s weaving is indeed a feat of metis, or cunning. She uses the socially respected, desexualized task of weaving a funeral shroud to maintain her freedom and sexual agency. On her loom she is weaving time: not only buying herself time, but also weaving Odysseus’s journeys back and forth across the seas. Perhaps Penelope is like the old woman in the cave, with the potential to bring the end of days if she finishes her weaving. Had Penelope finished weaving, neither Odysseus nor Telemachus would have rule over Ithaca, but she, along with the suitor of choice, would have. Penelope, then, not Ithaca, is home for Odysseus, for it all hangs in the balance of her loom.

Though Zegher is focusing on Amerindian societies when she describes “men’s arts are oral while women’s are, literally, material: men speak, women make cloth,” this is true for many traditions. So too is the fact that “hierarchical codes within our own word-obsessed culture dictate that the public, the verbal is the area of status, autonomy, importance.” [34] Like Telemachus sending his mother back to her room, the word-obsessed nature of culture seems to be almost as universal as the connection between weaving and narrative. But if the verbal arts are so tied to textile work, as I demonstrated earlier, then perhaps women are truly the context of power within all of these structures. For “cloth makes manifest deeply held cultural values that may otherwise be imperceptible. In fact, it may be women’s very crucial job to translate these ephemeral values into material objects.” [35]

“Women learned to weave many kinds of clothing. Then men learned to set down their thoughts in writing, so that what one generation knew was passed on to another” [36] is the text/ile history of civilization. As Rozsika Parker writes, the matrilineal transmission of textile making may make it a “means of education women into the feminine ideal,” but it is also a resilient inheritance that can be used as a “weapon of resistance to the constraints of femininity.” [37] As midwifery is to gynecology, so craft can be defined as the patriarchally unrecognized, even secret, counterpart to art. These secret arts are inherited traditions of creativity, practicality, and a connection to the cycle of life. Like home remedies, craft technique is an inherited, familial brand of knowledge; like charms or incantations, handicraft is an ancient ritual with symbols and stories that connect back to foundational mythology.

Though often unvoiced, woman is not unauthored. Woman, as mother, is not only “author of the page and author of the page’s author. The art of producing essentials—children, food, cloth—is woman’s ultimate creativity. If it is taken as absence in the context of patriarchal culture, it is celebrated within the female community by the matrilineal traditions of oral storytelling.” [38] To pass on knowledge is a form of storytelling, a perpetuation of the past into the future. Even if women have been excluded from verbal arts or written out of texts, they have not stopped communicating. Even when punished, relegated to the level of tools or animals, “even as they become nightingales (like Philomela) or spiders (like Arachne) they continue communicating on some level—there is a possibility of repetition which relates memory to a generalized technology of inscription.” [39] Through weaving, women can communicate in silence, creating forbidden texts in the form of textiles.

From the rugs that serve to keep the house warm to the everyday clothes made of home-spun thread, domestic craft permeates society, integral to the very fabric of our culture. This is a position of leverage through which to subvert social expectations, a mode through which women can wield power within imposed institutions. The domestic and marginal spaces of femininity become “spaces of intervention … where suppressed voices not only articulate their experiences and self-defined positions, but where they also express their participation in culture as active agents of transformation.” [40] As Rozsika Parker writes of embroidery, “limited to practicing art with needle and thread, women have nevertheless sewn a subversive stitch, managing to make meaning of their own in the very medium intended to foster polite self-effacement.” The relegation of domestic craft to a lower form is not a limitation and “the definitions of art and artist so weighted against women, are not fixed. They have shifted over the centuries, and they can be transformed in the future.” [41]