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Chapter Three
Weaving Sisters: Feminism and the Subversive Stitch
While prejudice against techniques originated in domestic crafts can lead to discrediting of female artists, there is the potential for power in the separation of crafts from arts. At the end of the twentieth century, Feminist [3] artists, including collaborators Judy Chicago and Faith Wilding, found in amateurism “a strategy that held both the traditional home model and the mainstream art world at arm’s length.” Craft was the means to express or manifest amateurism, as “a symbol of unjustly quashed creativity, and a token of the Feminist desire to break out of the stultification of domesticity.” [4] Works such as Womanhouse [5] and The Dinner Party [6] transplant the amateur and domestic into professional and public contexts, challenging “the presumption that women’s creativity itself [is] domestic and non-professional.” [7]
When performance takes process as its subject, an active audience is required. Craft blends together process and product, each contained within the other, in a performative collaboration between people, materials, and technique. [23] In the art world, the increasing fluidity between disciplines serves “to affirm craft as a living, breathing entity that has found a home among a DIY generation with an insatiable thirst for reinvention.” [24]
The Writer as Rhapsode: Weaving the Strands of Personal Experience
I go on to describe myself sitting at my grandmother’s loom in the family farm house in Northern Finland, land seeped in over seven centuries of family history. I follow the rhythm across the Atlantic to Ghana, where I was at the time of writing my college applications. There, I am threading beads into a bracelet, different beads for the various places that were part of my definition of home. As I wrote about how “on opposite sides of the world I weave my story, stringing together my family history and memories of the life I have led so far … all the people, places, and stories that intertwine with the rhythm of my life,” I did not know that four years on I would be in my final year at Harvard, returning to weaving and craft to tell my story.
Seven Women Weave: A Proposed Performance
Footnotes