Embroidered Cloths (original) (raw)
‘So am I detached / From the fabric which claims me’ Women, Fabric, and Poetry
Review of Irish Studies in Europe, 2018
Women are immemorially associated with fabric, in very many cultures. This article investigates how the constellation of fabric, women and art is differently invoked by the poets Eavan Boland, Medbh McGuckian, and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, writing in the mid-1980s, the early 1990s, and the mid-2010s respectively. The women-cloth connection is evident in underlying and widespread symbolic patterns of myth, legend, and folklore, irrespective of how far women were involved in actual cloth production at specific places and times. The connection is both metaphorical and metonymic. Both weaving, and the prior activity of spinning the thread from which fabrics are woven, are bound up with women and femininity in fundamental ways. In different societies and periods the roles in cloth-making have, of course, been assigned variously: where weaving was a commercial activity, economically significant in itself, the weavers have tended to be men, with women doing the spinning (as in Varanasi silk-weaving in India). 2 In her ekphrastic poem 'Irish Interior', set in 1890, Boland describes such a gendered division of labour: 'She has a spinning wheel. He has a loom…' 3 The northern counties of Ireland, for example, before industrialized production men were the handloom weavers, and the rural areas of Donegal continued in the twentieth century to produce tweed from yarn spun by the women, who also knitted and sewed as they did in North American and other households. 4 Clearly ethnographic, social and economic histories are always entwined with deep and persistent cultural and trans-cultural symbolic and ideological systems in complex ways. In this article, I tease out significant strands in the representation by three contemporary Irish poets of this women-fabric association and the meaning of this representation.
‘Stitching and Unstitching’: Yeats material and immaterial
Review of Irish Studies in Europe, 2018
At the opening of W.B. Yeats's short story Rosa Alchemica the narrator, a figure as prosperous as Yeats himself wished to be, sits in his study, surrounded by religious paintings by Carlo Crivelli and Piero della Francesca, 'every book bound in leather, stamped with intricate ornament, and of a carefully chosen colour', everything enclosed by 'tapestry, full of the blue and bronze of peacocks, [which] fell over the doors and shut out all history and activity untouched with beauty and peace'. 1 The reader is to picture an arrangement Whistler might have designed and the William Morris Company might have executed: on cloth, not that dissimilar to Whistler's Peacock Room, created for magnate Frederick Leyland, now housed in the Freer Gallery, Washington DC. The narrator's position perched amid such opulent aestheticism is bound to be disturbed, and it is, by the intrusion of his old friend the alchemical researcher Michael Robartes. The tapestry glows and fades, and the narrator is inducted onto a Rosicrucian plane as Robartes, 'speaking with a slightly rhythmical intonation', works his spell, becoming 'in [his] waking dream a shuttle weaving an immense purple web whose folds had begun to fill the room'. 2 This peacock tapestry, representing the finest of the material world, functions but as a curtain to the immaterial world, imaged by the weaving of even finer purple cloth, and later by 'men and women dancing slowly in crimson robes' that 'wound in and out [….] to the sound of hidden instruments'. 3 Yeats's use of textiles in poetry and plays is various, but nearly always contains a similar suggestion: that material, whether tapestries, or costumes, or curtains, or veils might be lifted to reveal a life beyond this one. So 'He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven' asks his beloved to 'tread softly' on 'the heaven's embroidered cloths'. 4 The cloths' softness of texture is delicately transferred to the gentle weight of footsteps, and even, potentially, to a quiet intonation of the poem. So often in Yeats's poetry material's revelation of the immaterial comes through sound. In Rosa Alchemica Robartes' metaphysical weaving begins with the sound of his voice. William Morris, a famous practitioner of both, nevertheless included textiles and fine-speaking amongst 'the lesser arts', although his interest in what he also described as 'decorative arts' is plain. 5 Yeats's recurring preoccupation with these so-called lesser arts and their interwoven connections should give us pause. These have long been arts traditionally associated with women, and so they are in Yeats's poetry. Yeats was no feminist, evidently, but his abiding interest in the art and work of women deserves scrutiny. Examining his use of these arts together uncovers an aesthetic not merely interested in a world beyond but invested in the labour and economic exchanges of this one.
Stitch a Square of Colour on the Darkness: Reflections on Quilting in Ireland
This essay explores the meaning of the quilt in Ireland. It begins with the history of quilting in Ireland, paying particular attention to the occurrence of the quilt as a metaphor in Irish literature. The essay concludes with a description of how the quilt has become a symbol for peace and how the act of quilting has been adopted as a communal response to violence in Northern Ireland.
'The embroidered cloth' Exploring folk embroideries of Bihar-a medium of expression
2018
In this dissertation, the author has explored various domestic embroidery traditions of Bihar, India that are diminishing day-by-day. Through this essay, the author investigates how these embroideries act as a tool of storytelling and communication for the women artisans in the region of Bihar. The aim of this essay is to give a voice to these women and their age-old practice. The dissertation was awarded a distinction by the Academic Board at the Royal College of Art, London.
RISE: Review of Irish Studies in Europe, 2018
Clothing occupies a dynamic and varied role in poetry written in English from eighteenth-century Ireland, adding realistic detail and symbolic significance to many forms of verse representation. In this essay I examine the implications of this representation for our understanding of the interwoven character of individual subjectivity and commodity culture. Sartorial choices offer important insights into personal and political relationships, into the status of the wearer, and his or her individual or group identity. Clothing shapes domestic and personal transactions, where relationships-especially sexual relationships-are negotiated through processes of observation, praise and gifting. As well as its practical purposes, dress offers symbolic readings, and is linked to issues of representation itself: to the process of self-fashioning in times of social change, and to the relationship between appearance and reality. It is also, in this period, fundamental to the process of gender and national representation, and to our understanding of Ireland's economic place in the early modern world.
"Ornamenting a Narrative: An Embroidered Portrait
My research aim was to create a portrait following a sequential practice-based process. A female face was analyzed and informed by a mug shot photograph. Lesage embroidery and beading techniques define the facial features and surroundings of the subject matter. The final representation culminates my total experience while researching this woman's image in a practical and theoretical way. This encompasses the physical procedure of sketching, painting, and embroidering her likeness with a preoccupation and self-awareness to understand the theories engaged during these processes. With this, I looked to Michael Podro's Depiction and the concept of "subjectification" in creating a portrait. In my studies of the mug shot I sourced Roland Barthes's theories of "essence" of a person and his concept of "punctum"-the personal and unexplained emotional response caused by a photographic image. Also, I willingly addressed the issues of agency in the subject, viewer, and image-maker relationship. iv Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge my advisors, Professor Alice Chu (first reader) and Professor Grahame Lynch (second reader). This has been an involved and challenging process and their supervision and expertise has been invaluable to the successful completion of this project. Additionally, I would like to thank Professor Colleen Schindler-Lynch for her guidance during the development of the composition and the creative challenges of transferring thought process to visual execution. Dr. Kimberly Wahl played a pivotal role in the articulation of my theoretical research during the early stages of the creative process. With her input and encouragement I was able to communicate the complexities of the procedures and the overall refinement of the methodology. Professor Pui Yee Chau is my constant technical advisor to answer any questions or concerns regarding fabric, materials and technique. As well, without the intellectual and artistic support of my parents my creative and academic goals would not be possible. This has been a team effort and I have had the tireless encouragement, belief and inspiration of my mother and father for the entire duration of my master's studies. Thank you to all the above-mentioned people, the Faculty of Design and Communication and the Ryerson School of Fashion Graduate Studies.
Susan Broomhall, ed., Authority, Gender and Emotions in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, Palgrave, 2015
The activity of embroidery for elite women, such as Bess of Hardwick, Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I, in sixteenth-century England, provided opportunities for private and public emotional expression and served as illustration of and counterpoint to their changing fortunes, and sometimes even as the instrument of their authority. At the same time, printed pattern or model books for textile work, which first appeared in Europe in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, proliferated, with many examples copied and adapted to suit different national markets. These books were ostensibly designed by men and aimed primarily at an audience of leisured women, providing patterns, though not instructions, for popular types of embroidery and lace. Frequently, they also included verses extolling the benefits of needlework in inculcating virtue and providing pleasure for those who worked the patterns. These texts have been interpreted as indicating a degree of passivity on the part of the women who worked from these designs. Other texts, however, such as the epitaph for Elizabeth Lucar who died in 1537, depict women capable of designing as well as producing sophisticated embroideries. This chapter examines the roles of both the practice of embroidery and the printed pattern books in sixteenth-century England. It considers women as designers, producers and consumers of embroidery, and interrogates the place of creativity and agency in their work, the ways that needlework was used in the construction of morality and gender, as well as in their emotional and political lives.
Performing curiosity: re-viewing women’s domestic embroidery in seventeenth-century England
The Seventeenth Century
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