Can you fix this for me? Knotted writing, textiles and language

A note from the author: I wrote this text in January 2022. I had just graduated from the UvA research master’s in art studies and was thinking a lot about textile repair and care while getting distracted in zoom meetings. Many things have shifted since 2022, but I still find myself thinking a lot about textile repair and care, and continue to get distracted in zoom meetings.

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Over the past few years, I have been researching the potential of needlework repair as a standpoint for assessing issues of memory, care, and labour. In looking at these practices, I have sought to question the ways in which we are drawn to fix things and how we become attached to these objects, their holders, and the process of repair itself in the act of fixing them.

While initially I approached the topic as a theoretical onlooker, the language and practice of mending has subsequently crept its way into my daily life. The emergent isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic granted material objects a deeper interest, and amid Zoom-based lectures and online learning, my hands itched for tasks to maintain my focus. Needlework offered an anchor, and I began to mend, reinforcing buttons and darning socks. As the lockdowns continued, these practices expanded, my fingers learning embroidery and knitting. In Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture, Timothy Ingold describes the alternate modes of knowledge he and his students gained from embodied research practices, such as basket making:

What did we learn? Four things, really: about how the hands get to know materials, or acquire a ‘feel’ for them; about how they impart a rhythm to these materials in the iteration of their own movements, and how the materials, in turn, carry a memory of their manipulation; about how the forces and energies bound into the materials through these gestural movements hold them together—that is, how the friction of opposed torsions makes things stick; and about the correspondence of materials in making. (118)

Describing the act of making as a form of multidirectional process, Ingold encourages us to consider how making, rather than the moulding of raw materials into a final form, is instead “the drawing out or bringing forth of potentials immanent in a world of becoming” (31). This language of correspondence when considering the topic of needlework, highlights the potential of practice-based research to enliven an object. Rather than functioning as a blank ahistorical canvas for study, textiles are already inscribed with their own memories of sourcing and production; hands-on practice situates these within a continuous “narrative of anticipated use” (70). In this way the act of stitching shifts repair from the zone of theory to practice—a way of moving through the world and caring for those within it.

These efforts have coincided with a sharp rise in handicrafts during the early waves of the pandemic, with house or room-bound individuals engaging in the manual pursuits of baking, gardening, and needlework in record numbers (Wood). In learning from doing and mending the clothes of my loved ones, I experienced the push and pull common to care-work: feeling both satisfaction in my labour and tedious frustration in the time and effort it takes to mend, to suture, to fix. This uncertainty surrounding the pairing of skill and care, especially with unpaid forms of work, highlights the ambivalent double-bind present in the histories of handicraft. Simone de Beauvoir’s oft-quoted phrase that “with the needle or the crochet hook, woman sadly weaves the very nothingness of her days” may accurately reflect the enforced ennui of housebound isolation (643), but it fails to communicate the stark domestic labour disparities so commonly exacerbated during the pandemic. Rozsika Parker observes, “On one level the use of craft validates women’s traditional skills and emphasises how much pleasure there is in, for example, crocheting. On another level it draws attention to the way our time and energy has been absorbed by our massive contribution to the domestic economy: knitting, sewing, and furnishing the home” (208).

My experience with fabrics as a medium of artistic practice is limited, situated between years of clumsy mending and a brief but ongoing foray into more technical thread work with groups like the Amsterdam’s Women’s Knitting Association, Feministische Handwerk Partij, and Artistic Research Knitting Clubs. My blundering handicrafts were strengthened by the guiding hands, presences, and voices of others: the gossip and advice of more seasoned crafters, the kitsch wisdom of slowed-down YouTube tutorials. Alongside tinkering on works in process, we collectively learnt new methods for repair: net darning, needle weaves, and boro stitches. When writing about textiles, the tacit knowledge of textures can become lost in the shift to text; it was only in doing that I learnt the abundance of failure, frustration, and uncertainty within amateur handiwork, a twisted process where one finished garment often hides days of unravelling, unstitching, and abashed abandonment.

As with recounting any hands-on practice, in the pursuit of a clear narrative, the twists and turns of the making process are often combed from the text, the final account failing to communicate the newfound avenues of thinking that the doing itself opened up. In the opening chapter of the Handbook of Material Culture, Christopher Tilley highlights these gaps of experience between written language and touch, the shift in expression reaching across a cognitive divide that cannot be easily bridged or translated: “if material culture simply reified in a material medium that which could be communicated in words it would be quite redundant. The non-verbal materiality of the medium is thus of central importance” (62). 

The non-verbal materiality of fabric presents a tangible opportunity for the researcher, offering a medium in which hierarchies between sight and touch might be eschewed in favour of a more trans-sensory approach (Chion, 137). In the 1997 essay “Textiles, Text and Techne,” Victoria Mitchell describes the multi-layered histories of writing about textile, investigating the common language in both writing and craft traditions. Observing the traces of common word roots between text and textile in the latin texere, ‘to weave,” Mitchell highlights the shared associations between the study of textiles and text production throughout the history of critical thought. From Homer to Virginia Woolf—stories are spun while readers wait on tenterhooks—Mitchell writes, “These fragile references suggest for textiles a kind of speaking and for language a form of making” (10). This evokes the poetics of textile and the tangibility of text. Through this line of thinking, writing too becomes a process of assemblage, a site of labour.

This blending of terminology is not one-directional, and the blurred ground between writing and textile production is palpable in the work of many textile artists. Observing the mending projects of textile restorers like Bronwen Jones and Celia Pym, I think the multitudinous ways of thinking and writing about, but most importantly doing, needlework repair offer a means of holding and building across such gaps. An example is weaver and designer Anni Albers, her calls to “let the threads be articulate again,” highlighting the importance and potential of non-verbal fibre as a medium of communication (32). These entangled connections between writing and making reveal themselves in the titles of Albers’ later works, such as Memo (1958), Haiku (1961), and Code (1962). Resonant of Albers, Cecilia Vicuña’s use of the indigenous knotting method quipu draws direct parallels between the physical act of textile production and indigenous methods of documentation. Largely suppressed by imposed writing systems during the period of the conquista, the braiding technique of quipu is an ancient Inca knotting system used as a mnemonic device and for cataloguing numerical data. In the system of quipu, the colours, textures, and style of the fabric impart meaning; they are used to record historical events, oral poetry, and philosophy. Both makers illustrate fabric’s potential as a nonverbal mode of communication, while at the same time showcasing in their practice the flexible malleability of written language. In their graphic design and poetry respectively, Albers and Vicuña also stretch and sculpt the written word. In their hands, text and textile stand not in antithesis but in partnered pursuit of richer modes of expression, added tools for intertextual craft.

Successful darning functions by bridging across rupture: carefully layering new and old fibre in the broken spaces. When attempting to discuss my research, my words brush up against encounters between text and texture. The language of making surfaces in my writing, and it has become a frequent motif in my speech. Double-meanings abundant, I speak of theories as being interwoven, enmeshed, intertwined. I describe the process of threading through a key theory, of lacing together stray paragraphs, of reinforcing holes in my argument. At times, I criticise chapters for being threadbare, patchy, tattered. I am left uncertain about what has come first; whether the act of mending has slowly infiltrated my words or if the topics of my research inevitably invite such images, the language of care and repair being embedded with threadlike images of relationality from the outset. In Fray: Art and Textile Politics, Julia Bryan-Wilson speaks to this general “lay expertise,” which results from each person’s lifelong, although often unrecognised, proximity to an embodied knowledge of cloth. “Accounting for textiles,” Bryan-Wilson writes, “objects that are in close physical contact with us at virtually every minute of the day – demands alternative methodologies, ones that extend from shared bodily knowledge” (6). The question that arises is how to write about textile work while continuing to acknowledge these gaps between text, touch, and the cultural hierarchies that have long distinguished them? 

How might one critically assess fibre art whilst also acknowledging that “a piece of cloth is only half-experienced unless it is handled”? (Collingwood 451). When writing about making, Ingold argues, “To describe any material is to pose a riddle, whose answer can be discovered only through observation and engagement with what is there. The riddle gives the material a voice and allows it to tell its own story: it is up to us, then, to listen, and from the clues it offers, to discover what is speaking” (31). Rather than pinning down the essence of a textile, how might we instead write of its handling in ways that continue to unfurl its potential for uncertainty, mistake, and curiosity? How might writing within and around textiles encourage the production of softer and stretchier texts? In thinking of the production of text and textile as ongoing riddles, our writing becomes something more visibly crafted, a material which might be folded, patched, prone to fray and amenable to repair. 

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