|
Cloth & Culture NOW
the artists - Maxine Bristow, UK
Asked to address the themes of Cloth & Culture NOW and
the significance of cultural identity prompts reflection on points
of origins and a search for clues in the authenticity of lived
experience. As Sue Rowley suggests in discussing the relationship
between Craft and narrative traditions, ‘we know who we are
by the stories we tell’.1 Whilst the stories we tell ‘can
offer a window into individual subjectivity and identity’,2
through a collective consciousness they can also provide the necessary
clues to what might be a sense of national cultural identity. How
this collective consciousness might operate across cultures and
where we might find common trans-national connections is the subject
of this project and something that will be revealed through the
process of sharing our stories. For now, however, I begin closer
to home with reflections on my own story with the intention of
firstly, understanding the possible significance of my own cultural
roots and secondly, understanding how this cultural specificity
might find expression in my current practice.
Although I have been aware of connections between
the preoccupations within my work and my family heritage, until
now I have paid it little attention other than making reference
to it as an interesting anecdote. Indeed, I have vehemently resisted
the call to autobiography perhaps because of what I see as an only
too prevalent tendency in much textile practice to validate its
existence and seek meaning through sentimental and nostalgic references
to the past. It has been an interesting exercise, however, in the
context of this project, to revisit aspects of my past, which undoubtedly have shaped
my experience, but maybe through their sheer familiarity have not
until now necessarily registered as significant
So what are my cultural roots?
Born in Lancashire I guess I was physically and emotionally surrounded
by the legacy of the textile industry. In fact from the age of
12 I lived in Barrow Bridge which in its heyday of the 1800’s
was a model industrial village and a cradle of Bolton’s
cotton industry. The village then consisted of two six storey
cotton spinning and doubling mills, cottages for the workers,
an educational institute, and a workers’ co-operative [where
my Mother still lives]. Indeed it was such a model of advanced
industrial reform that in 1851 it was visited by Prince Albert
the Prince Consort and even William Morris was known to have
made reference to Barrow Bridge’s “wonderful educational
establishment”.3 The mills have long gone, and although
now a quiet beauty spot, the faint whispers of its once prestigious
industrial past still echo through the villageand cannot fail
to imprint themselves on your consciousness.
In terms of my family’s direct connection with textiles,
there is a lineage of functional sewing and dressmaking passed
down from my great grandmother. My paternal grandmother was a professional
seamstress who [from the little that is known of her as a young
woman] worked in Chester [coincidently where I myself now work] ‘sewing
linen for the big houses’. My maternal grandmother and mother
were also both amateur dressmakers, although according to my mother,
whilst economics were a primary motivation, her approach [much
to the disapproval of my paternal grandmother] was far more ‘hit
and miss’, with an interest in fashion and the opportunity
for individual creativity being a key incentive. As one of three
girls, for much of our early lives we were all dressed exactly
the same. My mother would often buy her own outfit and then make
if not matching, then complimentary outfits for the three of us
- and for special Birthday and Christmas ‘ensembles’ our
dolls would also receive replica miniature versions! On Wednesday
evenings our outfits would be laid out [hats, white gloves, matching
socks and knickers - the lot!] and on Thursday’s we would ‘go
to town’ to meet my grandmother for morning coffee.
In her conference paper On the Margins: Making Clothes at
Home between the War, which is later developed as a Chapter
in The Culture of Sewing Gender, Consumption and Home Dressmaking, Cheryl
Buckley provides us with an interesting insight into ‘some
of the methodological and theoretical questions which arise for
historians studying the ways in which working-class women made
clothes for themselves, their families, and the local community’.4
Buckley states that ‘Arguably dress and dressmaking are
cultural sites where identity, place and memory figure prominently.
As designed objects and a design method they are ‘unspeakingly
meaningful’, yet undervalued by historians’.5
On the male side of the family there is
interestingly the same combination of professional and amateur
experience but this time in relation home improvements. My maternal
Grandfather [though he died when I was only two years old] ran
his own business and was renowned in Bolton as a master painter
and decorator; and my father worked for a long established family
run Bolton paint company and was an enthusiastic [and accomplished] ‘Do-it-Yourselfer’,
making amongst other things our own individually handcrafted louvered-door
fitted kitchen and a very smart ‘modernist’ sofa and
matching armchairs. When we moved to Barrow Bridge, my stepfather
single-handedly converted the mill shop and adjoining cottage -
with my mother at the helm as ‘design consultant’.
Although there has been no conscious preservation
and continuance of tradition and no direct correlation between
my family history and my current practice, I can see that there
has been an unconscious processing and reconstituting of experience,
attitudes, and values, which upon reflection, do seem to have
silently woven their way into the fabric of my work. It has been
a silent inheritance; knowledge and skills transferred through
tacit acquisition - an unspoken language communicated, as with
much craft practice itself, through the continuity of touch.
I recognise a family, and indeed, wider cultural inheritance,
in amongst other things, the appreciation of skills and traditions;
the care and respect for tools and the quiet dignity of utilitarian
objects [to this day I still use some of my father’s tools and clean and wrap my paintbrushes in
exactly the same way as he did]. I see a care for things hard come
by and its associated ‘make do and mend’ mentality,
a strong work ethic, the silent satisfaction of a job well-done….and
perhaps the quiet pleasure of an ego satisfied when the product
of one’s creative labour is displayed for all to see!
This inheritance unconsciously began to manifest itself in the
visual research that was formative in the establishment of my current
practice. Much of this visual research focused on material culture
and on visits to the ethnographic and social history departments
of museums where I was fascinated by the tension between, on the
one hand my aesthetic reading of the objects, and on the other
hand, their position as cultural artefacts which through their
ambiguity gave rise to a multiplicity of narrative readings and
possible meanings. Closer to home, I looked to the history and
traditions of needlework and plain sewing. I collected old linen,
old needlework tools, and sewing manuals and particularly remember
being enthralled by the delightful 19th Century The Workwomans’ Guide,6
which interestingly in the light of the significance Art History
places on the authored object, was notably only recorded as being
written by ‘a Lady’. Whilst the focus of my visual
research was nameless utilitarian objects, through their patina
of use they somehow seemed to provide a model of authentic experience.
Though not in an explicit way but through
the quiet dignity of plain sewing, its labour intensive process
of production and its reference to utility, my work taps into
the narratives of a utopian ideal where ‘poetic truth is found in the ordinary, in the
quotidian, not the sublime’7. Drawing on Textiles’ position
within the Applied arts and Crafts, it could be seen to be part
of a wider romanticised nostalgic Crafts ideal, an ideal that ‘proposes
a way of life with a particular value; a way of life which overcomes
alienated existence, the sort of existence all too familiar in
the twentieth century’8. Insights into my narrative identity
show that I am clearly predisposed to the workings of nostalgia
and that my work utilises collective memory for maximum expressive
potential. According to Susan Stewart in On Longing Narratives
of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection:
Nostalgia is a sadness without an object, a sadness which creates
a longing that of necessity is authentic because it does not take
part in lived experience. Rather it remains behind and before that
experience. Nostalgia, like any form of narrative, is always ideological:
the past it seeks has never existed except as narrative, and hence,
always absent, the past continually threatens to reproduce itself
as a felt lack. Hostile to history and its invisible origins, and
yet longing for an impossibly pure context of lived experience
at a place of origin, nostalgia wears a distinctly utopian face,
a face that turns toward a future-past, a past which only has ideological
reality. This point of desire which the nostalgic seeks is in fact
the absence that is the very generating mechanism of desire.9
Whilst drawing on the power of nostalgia, I have nevertheless
always been wary of the work falling into the realms of sentimentality.
The tension I am faced with in my practice is how to make use of
these potent historical narratives without totally succumbing to
what Beverly Butler in Heritage and the Present Past describes
as the ‘negative, banalised version of nostalgia as cultural
pathology’10. Though looking to the past, it has always been
crucially important that my work is firmly situated in the present
and engages with wider contemporary critical debates.
This relationship between the past and present, tradition and
innovation, media specificity, and its position within wider contemporary
culture, is something that had its genesis in my undergraduate
degree BA[Hons] Fashion/Textiles [Embroidery]. Though skills were
religiously taught as part of the programme and there was a deep
respect for history and tradition, the work that came out of the
department was forward looking and continually challenged boundaries
and defied traditional categorisation.
Having been positioned within a Fine Art
context for the last fifteen years, the notion of the ‘Expanded Field of Textiles’ is
now well-established; and as a discipline, Textiles has been seen
to align itself with the broader debates that surround art theory
and practice, the nature of which have themselves expanded over
the last thirty years in response to the growing pluralism, interdisciplinarity
and hybridity of contemporary visual culture. In this context,
the skills, histories, and traditions of Textiles that were initially
seen as an encumbrance to its acceptance within the higher canon
of fine art, again have currency and are commonly used in a strategic
way to challenge conventions and generate new practical and theoretical
perspectives.
So, though my work makes reference to
Textile’s history
through the narratives that surround plain-sewing, notions of function
and utility, and laborious and repetitive methods of production,
these narratives are re-presented in way that they remain ambiguous.
The visual language that finds its origins in textile processes
and materials is also the language of modernity, the grid, the
language of abstraction and formal autonomy. It is also the ordered
and repetitive language of Minimalism, which often seen as the
apotheosis of modernist idealism, is used in my own practice in
a strategic way to counter-balance subjectivity and offer a multiplicity
of possible meanings. By consciously harnessing the processes,
materials and accompanying discourses of needlework/plain-sewing
within the conventions of a minimalist aesthetic, the work acknowledges
the traditions and discursive contexts of both of these codes of
practice, but through a process of exchange, aims to subvert or
transcend their conventional definitions of meaning.Although the
work does not have an overtly political agenda, I guess it is political
in the feminist sense of the ‘personal being political’ as
it is born of my own experience and the systems, codes, customs,
values, attitudes and beliefs that have governed the landscape
of my childhood, education and working environment.
A key issue within my own work [and I
would suggest for contemporary textile practice in general] is
how to speak through a language that is itself already so culturally
loaded. How can Textiles draw on and celebrate its own histories
and traditions and speak through its own very particular language,
without reaffirming prejudices and restrictive perceptions and
leaving the critical categories which define it intact? Within
my work I strategically adopt the formal autonomous language
of modernism and in a way re-enact a silencing of women’s
lives but in the hope that through this silencing the expressive
potential becomes all the more meaningful. However much the work
aims to silence the narrative voices and present an autonomous
face, its neutrality is continually disrupted by the somatic
sensuality and psychological potential of cloth and by the social
and historical connotations of the needlework techniques employed
in its production.
Returning to the themes of Cloth & Culture NOW;
the techniques of seaming, darning, quilting and the use of buttonholes
are basic methods of constructing, strengthening, and repairing
cloth universal to all cultures, but beyond this, it is the textile
object’s social integration and position in material culture,
together with Textiles tactile dimension and relationship to the
body - in the sense that ‘touch precedes, informs and overwhelms
language’11, which I believe, provides us with what is a
clearly common trans-cultural language.
As Christopher Tilley describes in the opening chapter of the Handbook
of Material Culture:
Things are meaningful and significant not only because they are
necessary to sustain life and society, to reproduce or transform
social relations and mediate differential interests and values,
but because they provide essential tools for thought. Material
forms are essential vehicles for the [conscious or unconscious]
self-realisation of the identities of individuals and groups because
they provide a fundamental non-discursive mode of communication.12
Whilst I might not be familiar with the
particular ‘dialect’,
or understand the specific meanings of a textile object from another
culture, I can nonetheless, recognise a system of codes and a common
language that has an ability to move beyond cultural boundaries
and which can articulate simultaneously both a sense of ‘difference
and belonging; the individual and the social; self and other’.13
Notes
- Sue Rowley, ‘There Once Lived…’: Craft and
Narrative Traditions’ in Sue Rowley [Ed.], Craft and
ContemporaryTheory, Allen and Unwin, 1997, p77.
- Paul Thompson, ‘The Potential for Oral History and Life
Story Research on the Crafts’ in Tanya Harrod [Ed.],Obscure
Objects of Desire, Reviewing the Crafts in the Twentieth Century,
University of East Anglia, 1997, p49.
- The history of Barrow Bridge is documented
in ‘Barrow
Bridge, Bolton. Dean Mills Estate. A Victorian Model Achievement’ by
Dennis O’Connor, member of Bolton Industrial History Society,
1972 and is available through Bolton Central Library.
- Cheryl Buckley, ‘On the Margins: Making Clothes at Home
between the War’ in Tanya Harrod [Ed.], Obscure Objects
of Desire, Reviewing the Crafts in the Twentieth Century,
University of East Anglia, 1997, p221.
- Cheryl Buckley, On the Margins: Theorising
the History and Significance of Making and Designing Clothes
at Home’ in
Barbara Burman [Ed.] The Culture of Sewing Gender, Consumption
and Home Dressmaking, Berg, 1999, p58.
- A Lady, The Workwoman’s Guide,
A Guide to 19th Century Decorative Arts, Fashion and Practical
Crafts, Facsimile
version of the original 1838 edition: Opus Publications, 1987.
- Esther Leslie, ‘Walter Benjamin: Traces of Craft’ in
Tanya Harrod [Ed.] Obscure Objects of Desire, Reviewing the
Crafts in the Twentieth Century, University of East Anglia,
1997, p26.
- Peter Hobbs, ‘The Value of Crafts’ in
Tanya Harrod[Ed], Obscure
Objects of Desire, Reviewing the Crafts in the Twentieth Century,
University of East Anglia, 1997, p39.
- Susan Stewart, On Longing Narratives of the Miniature,
the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection: Duke University
Press, 2005, p23.
- Beverly Butler in ‘Heritage and the Present’ in
Chris Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Kucher, Mike Rowlands, Patricia
Spyer [Eds], Handbook of Material Culture, Sage Publications,
2006, p466.
- Constance Classen, [Ed], The Book of Touch: Berg, 2005, p13.
- Christopher Tilley ‘Part I, Theoretical Perspectives’ in
in Chris Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Kucher, Mike Rowlands, Patricia
Spyer [Eds], Handbook of Material Culture, Sage Publications,
2006, p7.
- Pamela Johnson, ‘Moments of Being’, The Jerwood
Prize for Applied Arts 1997: Textiles, Crafts Council,
1997, p.8.
UK
|
