NYT Saturday, July 4 2009 by Lauren DiCioccio.
Image courtesy of Textile Artist.org.
But today, needlework is still more commonly thought of as craft rather than art, restricted to the domestic sphere of women. Moreover, the painstaking labours of anonymous needleworkers producing items for daily use within the home go unmentioned and oft overlooked. For example, my mother and I like to spend a Sunday afternoon rifling through the housewares at second hand stores, where we have often discovered ziploc bags full of linens for some unreasonably low prive ($6 CAN being the norm). Always, we are astonished at the quality of these donated items; in previous hauls, we've taken home such fine quality goods as Portugese and Irish linens. Frequently, these items have been embroidered -- some by hand and some by machine; it takes a careful inspection to ascertain. In the past, these items would have been coveted and carefully documented in household inventories due to their added value. Some items would have been so costly as to have been cut apart or dismantled so as to salvage the materials -- can you imagine pulling apart, stitch by stitch, a pass of silk thread wrapped in gold foil?
Two anonymously embroidered table furnishings from the $6 bin at the WIN store. Left, cotton cover for an end table embroidered with what appears to be cotton embroidery thread and trimmed with a crocheted picot border. Right, linen table cloth embroidered with synthetic embroidery floss. Both items can be determined to have been worked by hand due to the mistakes (signs of human agency) contained therein.
It seems unfathomable to think that an item meticulously rendered by hand could come down to pennies on the dollar. This is the especially the case when one considers the pedagogies inherent to needlework. Needlework teaches patience, diligence, and perserverance. Moreover, its meditative qualities permit a freedom of the mind, while simultaneously facilitating a mind-body connection; when sewing, the mind and the hands move apart but together. They come away and they come back again. The depictive (rather than ornamental) aspects of needlework also require a careful consideration of the properties of spatial dimensionality and the material properties of the medium, even without the application of perspective theory. From composition to execution, every embroidery is executed with careful thought. Especially important is the fact that hand embroidery allows for a level of individuality and personalization uncommon in today's industrialized consumer culture.
I did not manage to find household inventory records in time for the course's end. I did, however, find many recommendations for how to find probate records, church records, and inventories -- most of which surrounded going down to your local town registrar in mary old England. Digitized emblems and manuscripts, of course, I could find; but it seems as though archives are slow to digitize such banal administrative documents. Even so, I can say that to reach this point in my embroidery has exacted no less than 162 hours of my life -- and I'm not even finished. Unlike the works of the aforementioned artists, my efforts will not appear in the laudable context of the gallery. Unless I embroider my initials (and even if I do), future researchers may not be able to connect this work to me. Luckily, I kept this blog; a document of the item's creation, since even the embroidering of heraldic devices and other personal signifiers is not enough to clearly spell out the item's provenance. I can only hope that a societal disenchantment with the mass produced furnishings of modern life leads to a cultural appreciation for the hand made and the home spun; I'd like not to think that my efforts will land in the discount bin of a second hand store -- unless it were to eventually end up in the hands of someone like me.
