Succumb
All works are 18 x 24 inches
Graphite and Guache on Handmade Abaca Paper
This work is part of a long-term
project Merletti/Lace, which has become increasingly important to my artistic production in
the last three years. Begun in 2012, it explores the history and labor of handmade
and machine made textiles in Italy and America. It also sources an earlier body
of work Embroideries (2008) and my
history of photographing the women I worked with in a textile recycling factory in
Charlotte, North Carolina (1990).
This work addresses gendered labor and
the difficult questions raised by textile traditions, including lacemaking,
embroidery and textile manufacturing at the turn of the century. This ongoing
project provokes a dialogue about authorship and women’s labor through the
production of large-scale drawings, paintings, and video based on the
production of handmade lace and mechanical textile production. These works
reposition the handmade objects of anonymous women in relation to the human
body, social status, economics and mechanical reproduction through changes in
scale, context, medium and design. I have also begun to compare and
reinterpret in these works the physical cardboard patterns which are used in the production of
handmade bobbin lace and textile machines of the early 1900’s.
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| Handmade Lace |
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| Pattern for mechanical textile reproduction |
The drawings give a place in history to the early work of women and men who labored in the
handmade and mechanical production of textiles. It is an alternative way of
exploring the gendered economics of labor, inter-generational knowledge,
problematic power structures surrounding textile production, authorship of
these objects, and textiles as an archive of our personal, economic and social histories.
The
Succumb series was produced during the summer of 2014 in Spello, and
Foligno, Italy. I spent time in Italy listening intently to the handmade
production of bobbin lace and mechanical reproduction of textiles in
Sansepolcro, Anghiari, and Bastardo, Italy. I think of these drawings in addition to their relationship to textiles as musical scores based on the idea that noise and random sounds are music, and there is no silence.
All works are 18 x 24 inches
Graphite and Guache on Handmade Abaca Paper
You can click on the images to see them larger.
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| No. 35 |
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| No. 36 |
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| No. 37 |
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| No. 41 |
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| No. 42 |
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| No. 45 |
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| No. 43 |
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| No. 46 |
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| No. 47 |
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| No. 48 |
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| No. 49 |
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| No. 50 |
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| No. 51 |
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| No. 40 |
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| No. 39 |
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| No. 38 |
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| No. 44 |
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| No. 47A |
