I plunge headlong into disaster
Hello friend,
I hope you are well and finding moments of beauty in your days.
This letter ended up a bit less structured than past ones. I got a bit caught up in an area of interest. I hope that's ok.
//happening
I started knitting a year or so ago. I love the mediative action and the creation of my own wearable bits. But mostly I love how I feel connected to a lineage of women who knit. My mum does (She used to when young, and restarted during lockdown) and both my grandmothers did. And it spans outside my family too. Almost forever, people, women have been knitting. (The earliest piece of knitting thats been found is some ancient Egyptian socks.)
This sense of history, and specifically women's history, I also find in embroidery and other textile crafts. It's a story I adore, of femininity and subversion and resistance. Taking what we were permitted and turning it into what we needed.
And while there are some examples knitting-as-artwork that really excite me - Casting off my womb by Casey Jenkins immediately comes to mind, it's sewing, embroidery that I really find fascinating.
I don't know how well I can explain it all. But look at Agnes Ritchers jacket her life story stitched as she spent time in an asylum. At Elizabeth Parker's sampler telling the story of trauma she was unable to write. The war dress by Kate Daudy Tracey Emin's quilts and so much more that I love and am inspired by.
"I’ve always had a fascination with the needle, the magic power of the needle. The needle is used to repair damage. It’s claim to forgiveness. It is never aggressive, it’s not a pin." - Louise Bourgeois
This is all to say, I guess, that I've been experimenting with stitches during lockdown. Hoping to feel brave enought to share something with you soon.
It took me a while to spot the parallels between these stitches, threads and needles and those I work with in my performances. A different kind of needle, a different line of thread.
//read
++ The original, handwritten deck of Oblique Strategies cards by Brian Eno.
++ Brilliant, brilliant Rebecca Solnit on the importance of not meeting nazis halfway - "We get this hopelessly naïve version of centrism, of the idea that if we’re nicer to the other side there will be no other side, just one big happy family."
Hands, face, s p a c e
//Hellen