Tender as Needlework: Remembering Through Cloth and Care

Author: Suzanna James

A Reflection by a TSA Student and New Professional Scholarship Award Recipient

I was running late, last autumn in London, and didn’t expect to arrive home already affected,  the keynote of Wafa Ghnaim landing viscerally, carried to a global audience through a humble phone and pair of headphones. Feeling a collective hush land on our global theatre, I settled in. Since last November, I have returned again and again to Ghaim’s work, and it has become part of what artist Dr. Storm Greenwood calls a ‘devotional citation’(1)– a practice that, for me, builds a vast and almost sacred bibliography, a call-and-response between making and writing that will one day shape my PhD. 

Over the course of the week, more and more presentations reminded me why it is that I work with, study, and make textiles. The work of Dr. Savneet Talwar felt like an echo of my MA research, first illustrated through Hannah Brancato’s reflections on her own award at the symposium – a connection that still feels significant now; and the memory work of Janet Pollock became another of the ways that the story and memory of cloth resounded through the symposium, in a hundred distinct and meaningful sounds. 

My paper considers care, memory, and cloth, with an undercurrent exploring the relationship between textiles making and beauty – its obligations, its rebellions, and a plea against its abandonment. (2) Reflecting on her own discussion session, Brancato writes, ‘Tender as needlework can be, its beauty is not saccharine’. (3) She articulates the words my research has been trying to find, the symposium acting as a co-creator for trying-to-put-your-finger-on what it is you have been (re)searching for. It felt to me like the tangible experience of the maker, always trying to find the right thread – Brancato’s words have stayed with me. 

Care was a louder message, arriving definitively through the aforementioned work of Dr. Savneet Talwar, alongside the panel of Tim Abel, Anna Boutin-Cooper, John Fifield-Perez, and Jeanne Le Medina. The words of Amy Elkins: ‘craft teaches us encounter’ (4) synopsise this experience; these are the voices with which my research speaks. For me, there was an overwhelming sense of belonging in this. 

Considering care and material ecologies, my research now engages with materials, memorial, and beauty – the found, the remembered, and the handmade – as well as migrated materials, making, and practices. It argues that these have the potential to heal cultural, ecological, and personal loss through memory. This contributes to a methodology of care-led, interdisciplinary, and borderless making and writing research. 

The symposium’s connections between care and remembering affirm a mutual hypothesis – these two are intertwined. This perspective resonated with Laura Ann Stoler’s notion of the ‘rock’ that breaks ‘the glass house of archive’ (5): we must care by remembering in ways different from those we have before. Ghaim’s work speaks to me as a living practice of this ontology. 

These ways of holding on, and practices of remembering, are now informed by literature within memory studies from Suely Rolnik (6), Laura Ann Stoler (7), Joshua Leon (8), and Saidiya Hartman (9), they foreground the development of care-filled preservation through textile making and remembering. Where something has been lost – a practice, a land, a community – the research considers a care-filled mourning through interdisciplinary practices of remembering. 

The social role of the needle punctuates this work, in response to the words of Louise Bourgeois, “the needle is used to repair damage. Its claim to forgiveness”. (10) I continually look to the socially reparative textiles work of Sera Waters on this. (11) This work of remembering connects to the work of artist and death researcher ‘G’ and curator Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide, written on by Abril Cisneros Ramírez. Their words; ‘care work, is grief work’ (12) position my research’s contemplation of an ethics of loss: what is it, how could it be developed, and how can we mitigate the loss of endangered textiles practices with care? 

My work now departs directly from its presentation during the symposium, and the experience of ‘Shifts and Strands’ remains a cradled part of its development. 

I am continually grateful to the society team, and for the opportunity to present and join the TSA community through this symposium which was not possible for me without this award. I am so grateful for the opportunity to be connected to TSA from this stage in my research, where I have the opportunity to learn so much ongoingly – it is a gift. I send an extra thank you to Kira Dominguez-Hultgren whose compelling work and articulation of practice, alongside kind and patient mentorship, helped to develop my presentation and my initial application to ‘Shifts and Strands’. 

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Suzanna James (b. 1992, she/her) is a UK based sustainable textile artist, writer and educator. She graduated with a double-scholarship MA award as a QEST Craft Scholar in Textiles from the Royal College of Art, London in 2022. Her research worked in response to the words of Louise Bourgeois; “the needle is used to repair damage, its claim to forgiveness” and was selected as the 2022 RCA Research Symposium Textiles Candidate. She has recently participated in an Artistic Research Fellowship at KMD Bergen, Norway, and is a New Professional Awardee and research presenter of the Textile Society of America 2024. Suzanna is currently a PGR researcher for PhD Candidature at the Doctoral School of the University of the Arts, London.

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