Writing, thinking, weaving
A collection of quotes about weaving, spiders, and crafting meaning.
I taught myself to sew when I was a teenager. Or tried to, anyway. I knew nothing about fitting. Didn’t even finish my seams. It took time but as I got better, I slowly came to rely on the ‘repetitive meditation’ of sewing and knitting. When the hands slow down, so does the heart. I make a lot of my own clothes now, and it’s something that has also opened my eyes to the social and environmental impacts of fast fashion, and the cultural histories embedded in different fabrics and techniques. I think that’s why as an art writer I’m so interested in artists who work with textiles. Textiles are material culture. They speak about bodies, time, labour, history and value. And then, they’re also bedded in our metaphors and the way we think.
“Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1876
“Life today is very bewildering.”
—Artist Anni Albers, 1938
“If you understand something in only one way, then you really don’t understand it at all. The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we've connected it to all the other things we know.”
—Mathematician Marvin Minsky, quoted in Jeanette Winterson’s 12 Bytes
“Text comes from texere, after all: to weave.”
—Textile scholar Charlotte Jirousek, quoted in Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode
“A needle and not a razor in my hand, I think.”
—Alice Walker, The Color Purple
“I came from a family of repairers. The spider is a repairer. If you bash into the web of a spider, she doesn’t get mad. She weaves and repairs it.”
—Louise Bourgeois, via Hauser & Wirth
“If you grow up not with toys bought in the shop but things that are found around the farmyard, you do a sort of bricolage...Bits of string and bits of wood. Making all sorts of things, like webs across the legs of a chair. And then you sit there, like a spider.
“The urge to connect bits that don’t seem to belong together has fascinated me all my life.”
—Writer WG Sebald, interviewed by Arthur Lubow
“Reality is not made of parts but formed of patterns.”
—Jeanette Winterson, 12 Bytes
“A sweat stain, a perfume smell, faded period blood mark on the back of a slip, creases at the elbows of jackets, worn knees in jeans…There is life and energy stored in worn garments.”
—Artist Hannah Gartside, on her installation for Primavera
“The textures of woven cloth functioned as a means of communication and information storage long before anything was written down.”
—Sadie Plant, ‘Zeroes + Ones’ in The Textile Reader
“With the embroideries, you can see where I’ll lay down one colour, and it won’t quite be right and I'll go over it. I like that that’s part of the process and that people can see and respond to that.”
—Artist Teelah George, interviewed for ‘Reverse Archaeologies’ in Art Collector
“Our surviving textiles from the Neolithic are astonishingly ornate. Clearly these Neolithic women were investing large amounts of extra time into their textile work, far beyond pure utility.”
—Elizabeth Wayland Barber, Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years (such a fascinating book!)
“For at least the past decade, metaphors of pen and needle have been pervasive in feminist poetics…The repertoire of the Victorian lady who could knit, net, knot, and tat, has become that of the feminist critic.”
—Elaine Showalter, ‘Piecing and Writing’ in The Textile Reader
“Webs look orderly, too, but unless you watch the spider weaving, you’ll never know where it started…You have to decide for yourself how to read its patterning, but if you pluck it at any point, the entire web will vibrate.”
—Writer David Shiels, ‘Spider’s Stratagem’ in Iowa Review, Spring 2006
From Successful Dressmaking by Ellen & Marietta Resek, a book I inherited from my grandmother Thalia
What I’ve been writing…
Recently I’ve had the joy & challenge of writing about Michelle Nikou’s alchemical practice. I also reviewed the Biennale of Sydney for ArtAsiaPacific, profiled Seth Birchall for Art Collector, and spoke to the New York-based painter Jenna Gribbon for the cover story of Vault. (The interview was scheduled for 6am. Kid had covid, woke up 5.58am, spewed all over the living room 5.59am. Fun. Times.)
I’m both thrilled and stunned that my short story Soroche will be in the Winter issue of Meanjin, out next week. I’ve also had a few little flash fictions published overseas, including Counting Out the Cloves in Litro.
What I’ve been reading…
I really enjoyed Divyaa Kumar’s recent essay on Khadim Ali & Areez Katki, a fascinating longread about textiles, war rugs and trauma culture. I’ve also been thinking about:
Claire Corbett’s essay on the politics of storytelling
Lauren Carroll Harris on the pivot to digital programming, but not digital art
Eda Gunaydin on Hanif Kureishi for Liminal Review of Books
Jennifer Down’s novel Bodies of Light (phenomenal, but do your research to see if it’s for you, it’s a very tough read at times)
I’m also looking forward to a quiet moment to watch the UTS Gallery talk with Nato Thompson, author of Culture as Weapon and Seeing Power.
x Jane
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