Chapter Three

Within a patriarchal hierarchy of space, form, and voice, craft—and thus women’s art—is equated with amateurism. As curator and theorist Glenn Adamson critiques, there is a “lopsided scheme in which craft, often coded as feminine … is always seen as inferior to the hegemonic category of art.” This “disregard for [crafts] has been convincingly critiqued as one subplot within the more general history of the devaluation of women’s art” [1] and continues to this day. As Adamson remarks of Anni Albers’s prolific weaving: While prejudice against techniques originated in domestic crafts can lead to discrediting of female artists, there is the potential for power in the separation of crafts from arts. At the end of the twentieth century, Feminist [3] artists, including collaborators Judy Chicago and Faith Wilding, found in amateurism “a strategy that held both the traditional home model and the mainstream art world at arm’s length.” Craft was the means to express or manifest amateurism, as “a symbol of unjustly quashed creativity, and a token of the Feminist desire to break out of the stultification of domesticity.” [4] Works such as Womanhouse [5] and The Dinner Party [6] transplant the amateur and domestic into professional and public contexts, challenging “the presumption that women’s creativity itself [is] domestic and non-professional.” [7]

The tenuous nature of textiles, as discussed in the first chapter, makes textile crafts especially fertile grounds for subversion and protest. In their ubiquitous presence and importance in society, textiles are a cross-cultural, -social, -lingual, and -economical craft, whether interpreted as amateur or professional, low or high art. These notions of categories of arts are indeed false and imbued with sexism. As Lucy Lippard wrote in 1978, it is “only in a feminist art world will there be a chance for the ‘fine’ arts, the ‘minor’ arts, ‘crafts,’ and the hobby circuits to mean and to develop an art of making.” [8] Although the 1970s were the “heyday of the handicraft reclamations,” it was through an embrace of the very divide between domestic and professional art. This “dream of a ‘feminist art world’ in which hobby and fine art objects are given equal attention has not yet been fulfilled,” [9] as Bryan-Wilson writes in 2017, nearly thirty years after Lippard, but there is a growing movement to consider both accepted “high art” textile works along with the “amateur.” Work such as Bryan-Wilson’s new book, Fray, place these forms of making side by side, stitched together as necessary halves of a greater whole “arguing that all these registers of textiles matter and that they must be seen in conjunction.” [10]

The political battle-ground that twentieth-century feminists perceived within crafting, an understanding of “textile practices as fraught with political and social consequences that rippled out beyond the realm of the ‘personal,’” [11] continues to be relevant in this century. From a resurgence in popularity of the hand- and home-made to the emphasis on Do-It-Yourself (D.I.Y.) as a form of both economical spending and anti-capitalist protest, [12] as well as visual and performance artists using textile to blur spatial and hierarchical boundaries, craft can be found as the tools and products of social movements.

The recent Pussyhat Project, [13] in tandem with the Women’s March that took place after the 2017 American Presidential inauguration, is a recent example of how craft can serve subversive, political agendas. A simple knitting pattern and clever name created by three women mobilized people around the globe to create over 100,000 hand-made hats. [14] Not only was the project a success in creating a visual symbol for the march and larger movement, but it effectively utilized, and expanded, preexisting physical and online communities, creating an international network of crafters and marchers. The use of knitting, crochet, and sewing, in addition to the pink color, celebrates the power of the feminine and claims domestic craft as a source of community and solidarity.

Not only that, but the Pussyhat Project expanded the definition of a participant in the Women’s March. As one of the co-founders attested, the project created “more representation” by including those “who [wanted] to be at the march, who support women’s rights” but could not attend for a host of financial or logistical issues, including being “caregivers, which is usually women’s work.” [15] The Pussyhat Project was made by and for women, providing “a focused activity related to the then inchoate Women’s March that individuals could actually do.” [16] This active engagement is not only important to the success of the movement, but a testament to the strength of the cause. The truly home-grown, handmade nature of the project requires a commitment of time and energy and a conscious, direct engagement with craft; the very act of knitting, not only wearing, a pussyhat has become an act of protest. Each hat is connected to the history of women’s craft—made “by hand, using traditional skills” and “an individual, personalized act of labor dedicated to communal protest.” [17] The Pussyhat Project is just the most recent example of a long history of “craftivism,” [18] from colonists’ Phrygian caps [19] to the AIDS quilt [20] in this country, and the countless other examples across the globe and throughout history.

As performance and craft are both operations of the body, it is an organic crossover for crafting to become the subject of spectacle. From craft fairs to open workshops, artists displaying their process is a common performative action, often with the goal of generating interest, educating, or increasing sales by demonstrating the laborious process. But when the labor of craft becomes the subject of art, process is granted the visibility and importance usually afforded to product. A 2010 exhibition entitled Hand+Made: The Performative Impulse in Art and Craft [21] explored the performance of process. As the curator Valerie Cassel Oliver explains in the exhibition catalogue, the “demonstrative aspect of craft performance,” such as is found at craft fairs, “provides a salient entry point for a discussion of performance as a catalyst and as an interloper to tradition.” [22]

While this is demonstrated by many examples of craft as protest such as the Pussyhat Project, the questions of craft within the art world today center more on the blurring of genres and the experience of art. Oliver asks: When performance takes process as its subject, an active audience is required. Craft blends together process and product, each contained within the other, in a performative collaboration between people, materials, and technique. [23] In the art world, the increasing fluidity between disciplines serves “to affirm craft as a living, breathing entity that has found a home among a DIY generation with an insatiable thirst for reinvention.” [24]

The “performative impulse” of craft is used to political ends by artists such as Beili Liu in The Mending Project, where textile and craft processes are used to explore cultural and feminist issues. [25] The installation performance features 1,500 pairs of Chinese scissors suspended from the ceiling. Under this threatening cloud of metal, the artist sits at a table, stitching together pieces of white fabric with black thread. Visitors are invited to cut off a piece of cloth from the wide fabric hanging on the wall to give it to the artist, who adds it to her growing blanket of patches. As the installation progresses, the stitched fabric grows to fill the floor of the gallery space. [26]

Liu is responding to a previous generation of feminist artists and commenting on a current reality; the installation “dealt poetically with the rising visibility of China’s female factory labor, as well as specifically considering Yoko Ono’s 1964 performance Cut Piece.” Liu transformed the gallery space into a place of performance, breaking the conventions of viewing by inviting the audience to touch, cut, and contribute to the piece. Instead of consumption or participation through viewing, the audience is led to a hyper-awareness of the space through the sense of danger created by the hanging scissors. This creates a “visible,” and, I would add, sensory or even tactile, “reminder of the constant state of potential threat” faced by mass production workers and the “labor of mending [becomes] an allegorical performance of conflict resolution as a perpetual activity.” [27]

Textiles, in their ubiquitous inclusion in society, are particularly performative in the process of being made, displayed, or worn. Weaving, specifically, is a performative process in its spatial and temporal dimensions. The process of weaving on a loom is like a theatrical performance: the loom, already built and warped, confines the spatial bounds of the process, much like a set establishes limitations for the performer; the textile unfolds over time, through the process of weaving, much like a performance, as a product, is the sum of durational activity of the performer. Just as each performance of a show is unique, shaped by the performers existing in real time and space and thus never truly replicable, so too is each act of weaving distinct, unique to different bodies, looms, and environments. Any action, including the unplanned, is recorded in the temporal passage of the performance; there is no way to retract or redact an action in a durational event. In the process of weaving, as opposed to the textile object that is its product, to undo is to redo. There is no way to edit the textile without doing the process of weaving in reverse, or “unweaving.” Thus, the process of weaving is always in progress—whether forwards or backwards, it is always progressing in time.

Textiles not only “warp between the past and present,” [28] as Bryan-Wilson states, but between high and low, conventional and revolutionary, anti-feminist and feminist, product and process, record and performance. The paradoxical and ubiquitous nature of textiles empower their unique ability to record and transmit memory, shape identity, and fold time. Textiles are enduringly significant, “even as they unravel; “it is one organizing contradiction of textiles that the more they are cherished, the more they disintegrate.” [29] Like the ephemeral process-product of theater, textile-making is a performance shaped by temporal and spatial limitations. Yet, within those codes and confines, a textile, like a performance, is able to transcend the ordinary, moving us “into realms of affective simultaneous coexistence” [30] of the existing, set text and its current, unique performance, of the textile pattern and the durational process of weaving, of the past and the present.

In a time of change and mobilization in the world, feminism and women’s voices have become increasingly central to my academic and artistic ventures and I continue to learn about the history, significance, and complexities of gender dynamics. In cultures dominated by men, where do women’s stories find voice? If traditional verbal and textual modes of narration are masculine, how is the feminine expressed? I am inspired by the women who persevere, claiming their voice and preserving their stories. As Hélène Cixous declares, to inscribe “in language your woman’s style” is to “blaze her trail in the symbolic.” A woman’s voice is not alone; “in woman, personal history blends together with the history of all women, as well as national and world history.” [31]

This project is my rhapsody, [32] my cutting, stitching, and weaving of my story, of my heritage of many craft traditions. To tell my story is also to tell that of woman; to weave is to integrate my voice into the weft of life, on the warp of history. I weave with all the tools I have, connecting pieces of my inheritance to those I have found or made, creating a new whole. Both in the chapters preceding and the creative proposal to come, I am weaving, taking the threads of history, literature, scholarship, and my personal narrative and integrating them into a unique text/ile.

Weaving is a part of my inheritance, passed down through at least seven centuries of Eilittä women who have lived on the land that now belongs to my parents in northern Finland. Language, too, is a part of this inheritance, and the stories it contains, from the national identity shaped by Kalevala to the specific oral history of my family. Strength, domesticity, resilience—these are all a part of this heritage, passed down to me through my mother and grandmother, connecting me to a long line of strong-willed women who lived in harmony with the harsh environment around them, faced challenging lives of farm and domestic labor, and wove beautiful, useful text/iles. When I weave on my grandmother’s loom, using thread she ripped from her family’s old clothes, I am replicating and perpetuating my inheritance. As I engage in the same activity, using the same motions as my ancestors, I am bringing the past into the present, weaving history into my rugs to carry this story into the future.

My inheritance is also Greek: my paternal great-grandparents immigrated to the United States and, as a student of literature and theatre I am engaging in traditions shaped by ancient Greek arts. I am Penelope, weaving time on my loom, telling and retelling history; I am Arachne, both proof of and depicting the skill of human hands, the artistry that craft brings to utility; I am Antigone, honoring ritual and the transcendent power of motion and repetition; I am Sappho, speaking to power, insisting on writing women into history. I am a writer shaped by the stories of the Western cannon and using the English language, inseparable from Greek influence.

As I engage with these threads of inheritance and scholarship, I am continuing a process of discovery that began during my transition into college. Mid-way through my last year of high school, I submitted my college applications, including a personal statement that began like this: I go on to describe myself sitting at my grandmother’s loom in the family farm house in Northern Finland, land seeped in over seven centuries of family history. I follow the rhythm across the Atlantic to Ghana, where I was at the time of writing my college applications. There, I am threading beads into a bracelet, different beads for the various places that were part of my definition of home. As I wrote about how “on opposite sides of the world I weave my story, stringing together my family history and memories of the life I have led so far … all the people, places, and stories that intertwine with the rhythm of my life,” I did not know that four years on I would be in my final year at Harvard, returning to weaving and craft to tell my story.

Since 2012, much has changed, both in the world and for me. While I have strayed far from the experience that, as a high-schooler, I imagined I would have in college, and though my academic path has been meandering, in retrospect I can find a kind of continuity. The rhythm of my life that I tried to convey to college admissions officers is one that I am rediscovering as I stand, yet again, on the edge of a transition. What beads will I add to the string, and what threads to the rug? What will be the new strand in my story?

From the weaving history of language to the crafted Kalevala, from the weavers of mythology to the domestic weavers of femininity, from feminist artists weaving protest to my own weaving lineage: my weft threads are broad across time and culture, but the warp of my personal experience brings them together. Inspired by Lemminkäinen’s mother, who embodies the strength and cunning of a “crafty” woman, defying even Death with her skill and her devotion, I weave a rhapsody of women’s stories. The strength of her identity as a mother brings me to examine womanhood as a whole, for, as Cixous says, “in women there is always more or less of the mother who makes everything all right, who nourishes, and who stands up against separation.” [33] It is this narrative—of woman as integrator, rhapsodist, weaver—that I choose to tell, claiming my own place as a crafts-woman and storyteller.

This final section is the last unit in, and the product of, the nine-part charm that is this project. Theories of craft, connections between text and textile, women who weave creation, the Kalevala and its crafty characters, the feminist weavers, and my own personal narrative culminate in this rhapsody, a proposed production of an original play. Drawing from the stories, characters, concepts, and artists explored in the past eight sections, and many more who were not mentioned, [34] I have written a script [35] and designed a potential production to accompany it. The devising process has included interviews, [36] experiments with writing in the Kalevala style, weaving, performance, and installations. [37]

The proposed performance is a drama for seven actresses centered around themes of inheritance, labor, and love. On a stage that functions as a working loom, seven weavers, all inspired by mythological characters, [38] tell their stories of weaving and womanhood. Seven Women Weave aims to submerge the audience in a world of weaving poetics, in which time and space are woven together and interlaced with the voices of women across cultures, eras, and stories. [39] While each scene is distinct and, perhaps, disjointed, they are connected by their common use of the stage-loom. This loom not only physically weaves their bodies and clothing, and thus their stories, together, but provides a medium through which these characters can interact with one another and share with the audience.

When the audience first enters the space, they experience the wonder of a new world in which the rules of space and time function differently. This is facilitated by the most prominent feature of the space, a giant net that stretches across the room, creating a textile ceiling above both the stage and the audience. Without the conventional straight or domed ceiling, the audience is attuned to the dynamic nature of space and how it shapes the movement that occurs within. During the performance, the net is lowered and raised in asymmetrical, undulating waves, highlighting and challenging assumptions of stability and structure. In moving across the space and taking their seats, the audience notices the fabric that connects their seats to both the net above them and the stage. As the performance progresses and the actresses interact with these threads on the stage and the net above, the audience is integrated into the space and process of the performance and understands that they are a critical part of the stories being told. They are the connection between the stage and the net, just as they carry these characters and stories into the fabric of society. They are the recipients and mediators of the stories, as important to the performance as the warp threads are to a textile.

The stage itself is a working loom. [40] Two fly-beams hold up heddles through which the ropes of the net, extended through the audience, are threaded and tied to a third beam at the back of the stage. Pulley systems allow for these beams to be raised or lowered, creating the alternating weave of a simple warp, with the opening upstage. A sliding beam on the stage floor acts as the beater, able to compress the weft strings woven into the warp over the course of the performance. [41] The weft thread is introduced by the actresses, either procured from the piles and spools of thread to either side of the stage-loom, or ripped from their costumes. Above the loom, the net creates a flexible, moving ceiling that is lowered or raised to create greater intimacy or more distance in the space, replacing conventional backdrops or set pieces as way to provide different ranges of motion and varying tones for each scene.

Soft yellow lighting filters through the net from lights in the grid above. Below the net, from the sides of the stage, brighter lights illuminate the moving parts of the loom. From downstage, foot lights illuminate both the net and the actresses, fading in and out to accentuate the movement of the net and the rhythm of the loom. The light creates a sense of warmth and intimacy: it is the light of the home, the welcoming glow that shines through winter windows and invites the cold and weary in. Though the other elements of the space may be abstract or transcend reality, the light grounds the space in a feeling of familiar, domestic comfort.

All of the textile materials—in the net, across the audience, and on stage, are uneven threads made from used clothing. Ripped, shredded, and cut parts of the garments are connected through tying, knotting, stitching, and braiding. In some places, the original garment is discernable from the patch of fabric, in others the threads are jumbled beyond recognition. No two pieces are the same, and each point of integration of fabric is unique. The net, the fabric around the audience, and the textile being woven on stage are an endlessly fascinating composition of a thousand threads, colors, and textures that calls to be felt. [42]

The costumes are, by contrast, simple, white dresses. However, these dresses are reconstructed, stitched together from a shredded original. This is achieved by cutting or tearing each dress into long strips, as if to make weft thread from the garment. Then, each dress is reassembled using large, loose stitches, to create what is almost a “perforated” dress that can be easily torn into strands of fabric to weave into the stage-loom. [43] As the stage-textile progresses, the white of the dress strips woven through the colorful warp threads creates a dynamic pattern in which the characters clothing blends into one single story woven through the colorful threads of the space.

The movement on stage is poetic, but purposeful. The actresses are working to share this performance with the audience; the characters are at work weaving their stories on the stage-loom. Their actions are mechanical and repetitive when operating the stage-loom and maneuvering the net, but fluid and abstract when engaged in telling their stories. There is a constant tension between the mechanical and the poetic in the dance of the actresses with the textiles, suggesting the co-existence of labor and creativity in weaving and craft in general.

This dichotomy is echoed in the vocal elements of the performance. The script presents many of the scenes as songs and these are indeed presented musically, but without accompaniment. Many of these songs are meditations on the Kalevala tradition in their employ of seven and eight syllable lines, repetition, and narration that alternates between first and third person. This influence is also reflected in the singing, which is more akin to chanting in the spirit of oral poetry rather than lyrical music, focused on rhythm rather than melody. Part and parcel of operating the loom, these songs are working songs, like those mentioned in the first chapter, set to, and designed to maintain, the rhythm of collaborative labor. The Weavers lend their voices to one another’s stories to share their communal experience of womanhood, interweaving the sounds and rhythms of their bodies, the loom, and the vocalized text to create a woven soundscape like the textile space they inhabit.

For all the mechanics of the space, the production itself is minimalist. There is no off-stage or backstage workings to the show, as the actresses themselves move the net and work the stage-loom. Nothing is obscured from the audience, as the goal is not spectacle but rather a communion of storytelling. The performance proposes a mechanism of telling and offers the audience a collection of stories to experience and interpret in the context of the visual-tactile environment around them. To this end, there is no over-arching plot or narrative to the script. Rather, the common themes and performance elements serve as the warp for the varied weft-threads of the stories. In sourcing characters and stories from mythology, personal history, and the work of other artists, as well as in combining visual-tactile installation, text, rhythm, and movement, the process of designing, proposing, and performing this piece is a woven collage.

Process is at the forefront of this piece, as is evident in its adaptable nature. Both the set and the script can be expanded or constrained to accommodate larger or smaller productions. Any scene in the script can serve as a point of departure for further elaboration in the form of text or movement, and the disjointed nature of the scenes allows for growth and new material. Similarly, the stage-loom and net can be sized to any stage, whether expanded to fill an immense cavity with colorful warp threads or adapted to free-standing frames to accommodate a stage without a fly-space. [44] This adaptability is an important part of the proposition of this piece: it is in a constant state of weaving and unweaving, always in progress.

The audience will exit the space having shared in the joy and the burden of womanhood and domesticity. Hopefully, they will be prompted to question the nature of expression, authority, and voice, and consider what alternate modes of communication the marginalized have turned to throughout history. Most importantly, they will have shared in a collective act of bearing witness to and celebrating the “world of women” that haunts Lucy Lacrom’s poem, a world of generation in the face of destruction and of love in spite of pain and sacrifice. Leaving a world of textures and text/iles, they will be more attuned to the woven world around us all, the hidden hands that have made it, and the stories it contains.