Final Narrative, IHP 09-10

I wonder if any part of this project could ever be final. I feel as though this "final narrative" will still be forming in my mind even as I present this, even as you read these words. This is one moment I am capturing, one thread I am following in order to provide a snapshot of something beautiful and fleeting. I have spent a year thinking about textiles, thinking about why they draw me in the way they do, and have found myself less grounded than before but perhaps more free to explore. I have found that I will continue questioning, continue sharing and continue walking.

For now, I want to stroll along this loop I lay out in the final pages of my portfolio. Once I began looking more closely at my own fascination with fabrics, I realized it went beyond the cloth itself. The body interacts with textiles in a unique way: they are an intimate part of our lives yet are largely taken for granted. There is a poem in the way fabric hangs from the shoulder...there is so much grace in a crumpled sock hugging a pink ankle. We have surrounded ourselves with textiles, so flexible and fine, so durable and dynamic. Our horizons are marked by clothes on a line and the sweeping curve of a sheet in the breeze. Our second skin is made of cotton and wool. We live in a cloth ecology. Yet even this glorious truth has shown its dark side. The damage caused by producing textiles at a massive scale is undeniable, and thus our bodies are interconnected with textiles in another way. By alienating ourselves from the practice of creation on an intimate scale, our clothes, our sheets, our woven environment, have become poisonous.

This brings us one step further along this little loop to the important aspect of textiles as a focal practice. There is an immense and important difference between production and creation, just as there is a difference between violence and power. They may both appear to reach the same ends, but the process of getting there makes all the difference. The producer produces for the sake of the product, while the creator creates for the sake of creating. The latter is an act of love, care and patience. Creation demands attention at every level of detail. Creation actively links the body to the process and in this way is the antidote to alienation. When we are alienated from the process of creating something as central as cloth, we are lost.

This brings us to the final piece of the circle, the bit that ties it all together again. Communities are woven literally and figuratively by textiles. People identify culturally through their clothing, and not only aesthetically. Think of the camaraderie found when you see textiles that you recognize being worn by someone you do not know. Think of the patterns and textures that fill the spaces in your memory. Our communities are knit out of these things. Without a relationship to our clothing, we loose our relationship to our places.

Weaving has also become a meaningful metaphor for rethinking a way of being in the world. To live as one thread in a tapestry of millions of threads could be a viable mode of being, rather than striving for dominance and control. Cloth is resilient, it is flexible, because it is made up of so many tiny threads. Some threads cross, some do not but they all add their strength to something greater. This larger entity is forever changeable...it is nothing but its threads.

After all this, after this year with all the beauty and struggle we have seen, this is what I have come to. Perhaps we should live in the world like a thread in the cloth.