Art and Design Commons^™

Here… Is The Place Where You Are, Leah Decter

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

In this paper I will be discussing my use of material and process as conceptual elements for exploration in my practice, and the ways that narrative intersects with my work. I will be focusing on the first four works in ‘here’, my ongoing body of sculpture, installation and video works. These works examine human relationships with place through a lens of the contemporary and historical.

I am not exclusively a textile artist although I have used textiles periodically throughout my practice and extensively in the last several years. In my practice I draw on the social, personal and formal connotations …

The World Of Words: A Major Contribution From Linguistics To The World Of Textile Making Off-Loom, Michelle Beauvais

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Despite not being an historian, I can agree with others that the study of ancient textiles cannot help but be bound up with the history of “fléché” (making braided arrowhead-design sashes) and that such study necessarily involves the archaeology of textiles. While such research is naturally specialized, it is particularly valuable when talking about a product and a “perishable” concept, like the classification of textiles in history. Over and above the terminology aspect, I have studied the confusion concerning the classification of “fléché.” Given the lack of guidebooks in French dealing with key topics like the three Supercategories of fabricmaking …

Difficult Subjects, Wendy Weiss

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

The Textiles, Clothing and Design Department in the College of Education and Human Sciences at the University of Nebraska has a graduate program that offers Masters of Arts and Master of Science degrees. Students have the choice of completing a thesis, project or coursework for their degree. Students who elect a project emphasis, notably in textile design and textile history/quilt studies department enroll in a graduate seminar called TXCD 873 Design Perspectives & Issues, which is described in the course bulletin as a:

Seminar [that] combines readings and discussion of contemporary issues in design with creative applications. The course culminates …

Stories Underfoot: Reconstructing A Filipino American Identity From A Patchwork Rug, Rachel Morris

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

As Eliza Calvert Hall’s words suggest, a patchwork quilt, made up of a lifetime of castoffs and remnants, not only brings together the artifacts of intimate relationships and events in an individual’s life, but also becomes something larger – a tangible extension of memory itself. Operating on the premise that “material objects… can [not only] act as the analogues of human memory... [but also] prolong and preserve them beyond purely mental existence, ” the material bases for my research are several patchwork floor mats from my childhood home that my family refers to as, Apo Nananag’s rag rugs. My grandmother, …

Nature Fancywork: Nineteenth Century Women Tell Stories About The Natural World, Andrea Kolasinski Marcinkus

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Idealized nature entered the homes of middle and upper class Americans in the mid nineteenth century in opposition to the harsh realities of growing industrialization, and as a celebration of humanity’s control over nature as both a recreation and commodity. This “man made nature” is evident in other ways during the same period: domestic architecture, with its bay windows extending into a cultured garden and yard; the growing popularity of pet keeping; and the science-mania that caused men and women alike to crowd into theaters to hear natural scientists espouse theories of glaciation or coral reef growth. This large-scale cultural …

Speaking When No One Else Can: Textiles And Censorship, Jessica Hemmings

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Textiles from around the world are capable of conveying sophisticated narration. But in regions where censorship, both in the form of overt government censorship as well as individual self-censorship exists, the ability of textiles to narrate becomes a crucial tool in the discussion of topics otherwise left unspoken. Textiles can offer a form of communication that, ironically, may go unnoticed precisely because of the “innocent” materials in which these messages are told. A growing “illiteracy” to alternative modes of narration such as those offered by the crafts offers an ideal foil for such sensitive conversations. As record keepers these textiles …

Designing For Future Textiles – Challenges Of Hybrid Practices, Zane Berzina

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

The potential of the future for both science and design lies in a multidisciplinary approach. Disciplines are merging, boundaries are melting and “many […] technologies are not significant when looked at in isolation, but become of critical importance when coupled with other technologies.”

Introduction

This paper offers a condensed case study of a cross-disciplinary practice led Ph.D. research “Skin Stories :: Charting and Mapping the Skin” which dealt with issues across the fields of design, art, textiles technology, electronics, biology, material science and psychology in an attempt to bridge the gap between aesthetics and technology. The artistic investigation examines skin …

Messages From The Past: An Unbroken Inca Weaving Tradition In Northern Peru, Lynn A. Meisch

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

The only documented unbroken Inca weaving tradition thrives today in the Huamachuco region of northern Peru (La Libertad Department), where females in several Andean communities weave belts chronicled in A.D. 1590 by a Mercedarian Friar Martín de Murúa. Murúa was entrusted with collecting tribute from and Christianizing the indigenous population of Yanaca in the Province of Aymarays (in modern Apurimac Department in central Peru). His contemporary Guaman Poma accused Murúa of exploitation of the Indians and drew him beating an elderly male weaver (Guaman Poma 1980 [1615]: fig. 647). In his manuscript titled, “History of the Origin and Genealogy of …

Nasca Needlework And Paracas Procession, Lois Martin

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Among the treasures in the Brooklyn Museum is an ancient cloth from the South Coast of Peru: 38.121, sometimes known as “The Paracas Textile,” and now more often as “The Brooklyn Museum Textile” (BMT) (fig. 1.). First acquired by a Peruvian collector around 1912, the cloth shuttled between New York and Paris in the 1920’s and 30’s, inspiring great interest and numerous studies. One of these, Raoul d’Harcourt’s Textiles of Ancient Peru and their Techniques (1934), has been in reprint since 1962, and continues to intrigue fresh audiences.

The BMT was one of several spectacular fabrics that spurred archeological exploration …

Wandering Minstrels – The Tale Of The Phad, Vandana Bhandari

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Decorative cloth has been used in India to portray folk epics as a means of entertainment and as a substitute for theater and other types of performing arts. I quote “The transmission media of the folk epics are large paintings, instrumental music, dances, songs, riddles, jokes, costumes and other equipments.”

“The tradition of narrating legends with the visual aid of painted panels is found in early literature - in Bhagavatisutra (third century), Visakhadatta’s Mudraraksasa (fourth century), Bana’s Harshcharitra (seventh century), and Vaddaradhane (10th century). Narrators in the Indian States of Bengal, Gujarat and Maharashtra use painted paper scrolls and those …

Acknowledgements, Carol Bier

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Nataley Nagy and Frances Dorsey deserve our very special thanks for the organization of such a splendid symposium, which indeed exceeded our expectations and goals. Thanks are also due to the dedicated staff of the Textile Museum of Canada, of which Nataley is Director, and to the staff at Harbourfront Centre, and its Director, Melanie Egan. We also thank Debbie Adams of Adams + Associates Design Consultants, Inc., who served as artistic director for the Symposium; her designs, logo and artwork, have served us as well for the Proceedings.

Ann Svenson Perlman stepped in to take on the role of …

Cartography, Cloth And The Embroidered Tale, Bettina Matzkuhn

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

I have recently been researching maps and their connections to textile. Looking back on my own body of work, I realize that maps have frequently provided a sense of geography and metaphor as I continue to seek ways to tell stories that are important to me. Dennis Wood describes mapmaking as “a transformative process.” I would argue that working with cloth is also transformative -for both the cloth and the maker.

Looking at maps has expanded my ideas of narrative. I like Margaret Atwood’s definition of narrative. She says it’s “one damn thing after another” with the operative word being …

When This You See Remember Me: Sampler Making As A Material Practice Of Identity And Selfhood, Mary Lou Trinkwon

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

I would like to acknowledge the extensive research done by Textile historians, curators and collectors. I owe a huge debt to their research and all the documentation that is available. It is my hope that I can build on this strong body of knowledge and offer some new thoughts to this historic, vibrant and diverse practice.

I want to share with you a short survey of the terrain I have been cultivating on the topic of needlework and sampler making. I want to talk about how I use samplers as a pedagogical tool and as an assigned project in my …

Weaving Independence From A Distant Cottage Industry, Fenella G. France

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Introduction

The fabric of flags is inextricably woven into our cultural heritage. Throughout civilization flags have heralded national identity in war and peace, as symbols of both victor and defender. Research into the origins of early 1800 flag fabrics wove a fascinating tie to England, where the wool fabric was made, and why it survived while the weaving industry was mechanized during the industrial revolution. Bunting fabric provided the canvas for the flag as a symbol of a nation and its people. This makes the history of bunting and its struggle for survival into the nineteenth century, an integral facet …

La Mode À L’Écossaise: Textile Of Diplomacy, Seta K. Wehbé

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

The fashion style called La Mode à l’Écossaise flourished during the early years of the French Second Empire (1852-1870). There is no equivalent English term for it except maybe “tartanmania.” In the early 1850s Queen Victoria’s fondness for wool tartans had already popularized this textile as clothing for women and children in England. Tartans came to France as a full-fledged fashion style after Empress Eugénie wore a tartan gown for the trip to England. The six-day State Visit of the French Imperial couple started on April 16th, 1855, a very foggy Sunday, when Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie set sail …

Preserving Provenance: Collaborative Conversation With A Textile Collector, Susan M. Strawn, Mary A. Littrell, Linda Carlson

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Introduction

Donations of textile collections are essential for universities and museums that rely on historical and ethnographic textiles for research, teaching, and exhibitions. In turn, collectors who have amassed substantial numbers of textiles seek appropriate donation venues. Provenance related to collecting individual textiles may be lost, however, before a donor selects an institution, or before the donation has been accessioned into a university or museum collection. A donation received after the demise of a donor who did not document individual pieces limits the provenance—the history of the source and ownership—of individual textiles. Without provenance, it is tempting to see even …

The Never-Ending Possibility Of Textile Art Education, Jan-Ru Wan

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Textiles have an intimate relationship in everyone’s life - whether one is aware of it or not. Textiles reveal so many stories and memories from every culture and society. My mother was an educator in a home economic school and I was trained by her hands; I was constantly busy helping her with quilting, embroidering, stitching, and making clothing. I grew up appreciating the dedication and skill in textile works. But it is the passion for story telling and the conceptual part of textile more than the desire to creating beautiful textile alone drove me toward the path of textile …

Historical Memory And Empathy In Studio Art Classroom, Karen Hampton

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

During the fall of 2002, I was a guest instructor at California College of Art and Craft in Oakland, California, and was asked to create a course inspired by my artwork and research. The course I created was titled, “Slavery, Internment and Transcendence,” subtitled "Artists of Color Who Use Historical Memory." The course involved the study of contemporary artists, their artwork and the historical context in which the artwork was inspired and fashioned

Students were taken inside the artist's world, learning to analyze artwork from the perspective of historical memory. By using "sense of place" curriculum, which included an understanding …

“Tie It On Tight, Girls!” Speaking And Acting Through Cloth In Southern Madagascar, Sarah Fee

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

It was another scorching day at the height of the dry season. Masy had come to visit me, bringing her basket of cotton to work. A Tandroy woman’s hands should never be idle. She began pinching out cotton seeds and the gathered girls and I picked up handfuls to join her. At one point, when conversation lagged, Masy held up a piece of cotton fluff and spontaneously began to tell a tale.

Long ago, we did not know woven cloth, but dressed in cotton fluff. Once there was an unhappy senior wife. She was unhappy because her husband loved his …

Delineating Women’S Historical Lives Through Textiles: A Latvian Knitter’S Narrative Of Memory, Eileen Wheeler

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

In presenting and analyzing the narrative of a woman who knitted for survival, I engage two continuing marginalizations in mainstream history; that the lives of ‘everyday’ women are poorly delineated and that the realm of textiles is undervalued as a source of knowledge.

Outside the visual art domain the status and potential of textile study, with its associations of domesticity and craft, is little valued. Yet textiles have a history of being associated with many other aspects of women’s lives, a relationship that is slowly being probed for the knowledge it may hold (Parker, 1984; Tickner, 1988; Ulrich, 2001). Through …

Textiles From The Canadian Front, J. Penney Burton

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

The craft of storytelling has all but disappeared from the Western cultural context, and there remain few peoples for whom oral traditions are still a prominent part of their everyday lives. Fiber artists and their work are frequently discussed by craft historians, critics, curators and connoisseurs, but aside from infrequent interviews in monographs and craft journals, their own voices are rarely heard. This is being somewhat addressed with the practice of conducting oral history interviews with leaders in the craft and textile field in the US, through the Smithsonian Institute, with the Nanette L. Laitman Project for Craft and the …

The Swedish Presence In 20th-Century American Weaving, Marion T. Marzolf

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Swedish weavers who arrived in the United States in the early 20th century before World War I found hand weaving a dying art in the United States, but their own skills were valued. American textile mills produced inexpensive and vast quantities of fabrics, but there was also growing interest in reviving the lost arts and crafts of the Colonial and pioneer eras. Influence from the European Arts and Crafts movement and the Bauhaus design philosophy was growing in modern America. These factors created new opportunities for a revival of hand weaving.

Sweden, by contrast, had retained its strong craft tradition …

The Sincerest Form Of Flattery: Modern Art And The Kimono, Valerie Foley

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

In 2003 I enrolled in a master’s degree program in arts administration. In addition to such classes as exhibition planning, appraisals, and computer applications, we had two sweeping modern art surveys, which took us from the birth of impressionism in the 1860s to emerging artists of the 21st century.

For one end term project, we each had to design a complete hypothetical exhibition, from mission statement to budget to invitation card to gallery space. The only restriction was that we had to demonstrate on paper that we could actually pull it off.

At that time, I had recently seen a …

The History And The Present Of A Traditional Textile Of Okinawa, Japan A Narrative Of The People In Miyako Island And Miyako-Jofu Textile, Yuka Matsumoto

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Preface

Miyako Island, located in the Sakishima Islands in Okinawa Prefecture, is known for the production of the Miyako-jofu textile. Miyako-jofu is a hand-woven ikat textile, which is dyed with indigo and woven with dye-resistant yarns of hand-spun ramie. (fig.1) “Jofu” means a ramie textile. In this paper, the dye-resistant process in which designs are reserved in warp or weft yarns by tying off small bundles is called “ikat.”

This study examines what the meaning and the role Miyako-jofu have for the people in Miyako Island and examines the relations between the people and the textile. …

Confessions Of A Red Thread Bandit Queen: Ten Years Of Fieldwork With Narrative Embroidery, Skye Morrison

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

I confess to living a life full of unexpected experiences trying to remove the bark from the tree of commercialism and finding the ever-fruitful world of contemporary textiles made by traditional artisans. This presentation is a series of confessions brought to light through fieldwork, teaching and working in India and Canada / there and here / two worlds made into one. We begin with the six images connected to confessions or thoughts to live by:

Always dream that something is possible. I confess that I can be very stubborn when it comes to realizing these dreams. When I first …

Sashiko Workshop: Experiential Geometry, Lucy Arai

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

The objective for this workshop is to experientially understand the connection between textile and math by drafting and stitching simple underlying grids from which all sashiko patterns are derived. This demonstrates the intrinsic connection between textiles and math.

This hands-on presentation taught the essentials of sashiko pattern drafting and stitching to facilitate an experiential understanding of geometry and subdivision of the stitched plane. Each participant received a threaded needle and a fabric square prepared with a grid, the underlying structure for all traditional sashiko patterns. I guided the participants through the process of sewing and drawing stitches through the grid …

Design Sources: The Edges Of Fiber Geometry, Barbara Setsu Pickett

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

My investigation began with the analysis of the stitched geometrical patterns used in the Japanese textile tradition called sashiko. This technique requires only needle, thread and countless hours of patient stitching. I became intrigued with the hemp leaf pattern called asa-noha. The crossing white stitches on a field of deep indigo blue, conjured up memories of starry constellations and the pinpoint, accurate mapping of laser surgery. When I look from one star to another, the stars seem to twinkle. I believe this illusion happens because the stars share rays. Looking at one star’s center invariably decomposes its neighbors.

Upon …

Textiles And The Body: The Geometry Of Clothing, Madelyn Shaw

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Physics and mathematics are not usually perceived as being closely connected with textile and clothing design or construction, either by scientists or by artists. Those who make clothing from cloth, however, must always take into account two geometries: the plane geometry of the cloth and the solid geometry of the body. In order to clothe the body we begin with cloth. Woven, knitted, knotted, or otherwise constructed, the inherent structure of cloth reflects mathematical principles. Interlaced threads create square or triangular grids, techniques such as knitting or crocheting can make grids of any shape, from triangular to polyhedral.

Those who …

Mathematical Approaches In Quilt Design, Gerda De Vries

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Mathematics often is thought of as the study of numbers and geometry. But mathematics is so much more. It also includes the study of patterns, enumeration, classification, problem solving, and logical reasoning. More loosely, mathematics is not just a collection of facts, but also an action: a way of doing, or a systematic way of thinking.

In this paper, quilt making will be discussed in the context of the latter view of mathematics. In particular, three quilts made with a structured approach to design will be discussed: Bubb’Illusion II, Wild Flowers, and Cyclic Permutations. Bubb’Illusion II represents early work of …

Constructing Garments, Constructing Identities: Home Sewers And Homemade Clothing In 1950s/60s Alberta, Marcia Mclean

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Home sewing is the most feminine of all the arts and crafts. It is an easy as well as a basic way for a woman to add to her femininity, whether she sews for herself, her children or her home. The woman who sews can be creative, make herself and members of her family attractive, and also stretch the family clothing budget.

The above paragraph is from a home economics thesis written in 1959. It neatly sums up the decade’s attitudes towards femininity and home sewing. In the years following the Second World War, the notions of public, active femininity …