Reflections on Textiles and the Symposium
Cloth holds memory. Familiar as this statement may be, I found myself thinking about this statement in new ways while attending the 2024 Textile Society of America symposium. The symposium made me consider how valuable it is that textile artists are the ones who reveal the extent to which cloth truly holds memory.
I was invited by Dr. Savneet Talwar to be part of a roundtable conversation unpacking her theory of needle methodologies. As a fiber artist and art therapist, Talwar developed this concept to identify how cloth and the embodied practice of stitching form connections between the present and the past. Centering on the felt experiences of sewing, this theory queries, “how the needle has become a tool to articulate an ethics of care in a world where carelessness reigns”1. Talwar’s theory addresses how and why the tactile processes of stitching, doing, and undoing are forms of care and remembrance. Talwar brought together four other fiber artists to think through the applications of this concept in our art practices. Here, I expand on Talwar’s theory by articulating elements of needle methodologies given voice during our roundtable conversation last Fall.
I joined this roundtable discussion alongside Sarita Kvam, Thea Canlas, and Aram Han Sifuentes. We opened with a simple prompt: Share a memory that describes your relationship with the needle, as a maker. Sarita, an art therapist and interdisciplinary artist who uses the needle to pull together disconnected parts of herself, reflected on intuition, and how stitching is a way of world building. She described a time when, looking for a cookie, she instead found a tin of sewing supplies. Through this discovery, Sarita adopted sewing as a process to make sense of the world. Her discovery is also a story of sewing being passed down; the box of material was a time capsule filled with practical knowledge. Through this story, I connect the needle to Mvskoke scholar Laura Harjo’s theory of kin-space-time envelope, in which memory, current experience and future possibility coexist in objects and places.2 Framed in Harjo’s case as a tool for Indigenous futurity, the act of sewing, touching or experiencing cloth might open up a portal to experience integrated, instead of linear, time.
Tender as needlework can be, its beauty is not saccharine. Thea Canlas discussed her piña cloth uniforms, which float like literal embodiments of the ghosts of colonization in the Philippines, with all its enduring impact on labor and economics. As theorized by Avery Gordon, haunting is “…one way in which abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life, especially when they are supposedly over and done with.”3 Canlas discussed how her research-based, conceptual artworks create a visceral understanding of commodification through material histories, by calling attention to how the Philippines came to be the largest exporter of labor. Thea started sewing at the age of three; it was part of public schooling in the Philippines. Even this fact is layered with the violence of a group’s value resting on their productivity. Here, the practice of stitching is, itself, evidence of history.
Throughout the panel, we resisted a binary understanding of the needle as either a generative and caring practice or as layered into systems of forced labor. Instead, we questioned when and how people choose to make, and when and how making is a coerced and exploitative reality.
Aram Han Sifuentes led our group in this critical analysis. Grounded in their own experience as an immigrant and the child of garment workers, Aram recalled realizing, while playing in their parent’s dry cleaning business, that the needle does hold the potential for building another world. As an artist, Aram now uses it as such in their socially engaged projects. Their memory reveals that, on the one hand, the needle is metaphorical, but they also consider how sewing is often the only job available for immigrant women. Therefore the needle is also always connected to labor.
As artists, each participant in this roundtable discussed stitching as research, as a means of coming to know and coming to feel our various collective identities and histories. Our conversation revealed that a political and activated form of memory is central to needle methodologies. In fact, the power of the needle is to be found precisely in its duality: it represents coerced labor, and also the sense of possibility that people find within themselves, even where there seems to be no choice. Talwar theorizes about needlework as an act of care and repair; our dialogue further revealed that to remember, to name, to confront, and to address systemic violence are also part of care and repair practices.
- Chatzidakis, A et.al.
- Harjo, Laura. Spiral to the Stars : Mvskoke Tools of Futurity. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2019.
- Gordon, Avery F. “Some Thoughts on Haunting and Futurity.” Borderlands E-Journal 10, no. 2 (2011): 1–21.
Hannah Brancato (she/her) is an artist and trauma informed educator based in Baltimore, whose art practice is grounded in collective storytelling and the creation of public rituals to bring people’s stories together. She began teaching in higher education in 2011. She is co-founder of FORCE: Upsetting Rape Culture, an award winning art/organizing collective active from 2010-2020. Brancato is currently pursuing her Ph.D in American Studies at University of Maryland. She teaches at Towson University and University of Maryland Baltimore County.
