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Embroidering Mexico: Feminine Spaces, Dechados And The National Space, Regina Perez Kamel

Theses and Dissertations

Mexican dechados consisted of pieces of cloth were women and girls would practice and record needlework. It was a practice rooted in western tradition where they were known as samplers. Given that dechados were objects that were made within feminine spaces they illuminate how gender is constructed through space, and how those gendered spaces generate different ways of knowing.

As the majority of Mexican dechados correspond to the nineteenth century, a period of national construction, this study questions the role that the domestic space played in the establishment of the Mexican nation. It proposes that although displaced and subservient to …

Mending What’S Invisible, Chaehee Yoon

Masters Theses

A written thesis to accompany the M.F.A. Exhibition Mending What’s Invisible, in which the artist’s personal experiences and memories explore the cultural identities and femininity in Korea and the US. These identities are explored by using traditional Korean motifs, embroidery patterns, and the visual images of the artist's childhood photographs in the projects of “Reconnecting of Nostalgia” and “Mutating”. Also the visual clips of the artist's hometown is demonstrated in the video project “Things I hated” that discusses criticalities of Korean cultures and a sense of nostalgia for childhood in Korea. The project comes out of a personal need to …

Accumulations Of (Not) Doing, Richenda Cope

Masters Theses

As I encounter life during a global pandemic, caused by a virus that has us all homebound, I continue my own struggle with a different virus that keeps me not only homebound, but bed bound as well. In this thesis project, I make my way around and through the questions of chronic illness, self-worth, productivity and a changing relationship to time that arise in this dual viral experience - situating the personal within a larger social/political context.

Reaping What They Sewed: Embroidery In Politics, Feminism, And Art, Lilith Haig

Honors Theses

The feminization of needlework under patriarchal systems of power and oppression has reinforced both long-standing feminine stereotypes and temporal sociocultural ideals. As a tool of patriarchal oppression, needlework has been used to confine women to the domestic sphere by teaching them to stay in the home, be quiet, and follow a pattern; as an educational instrument, needlework reinforced standards of women’s behavior, aptitudes, and conduct. However, women for centuries have silently resisted and subverted these expectations and ideals through the very same means. Women have utilized needlework during times of crisis and collective trauma for centuries as both practicality and …