I am in Spain, struggling in the august heat and my brain seems to have slowed right down (not a bad thing). I have been, slowly, reading 'Weaving the Word – The Metaphorics of Writing and Female Textual Production' (Kathryn Sullivan Kruger)[1] . I referred to it in my loom project in 2005, but I am revisiting it properly, as it seems the use of text and textile in my work is becoming so very crucial right now. The connections made between text and textile are giving me subtle new ways of placing what I do and how I do it.
A few glimpses here that have been pertinent; on meaning… 'By carrying the words and symbols integral to a culture's social and religious beliefs, cloth conveys meaning…()..if one of the main functions of a textile is to bear meaning, then the traditional distinctions we make between text and textile begin to fade'
On gender.. 'Because we habitually link female involvement to textile history, the recuperation of this history recovers a record of women’s participation in the creation of culture and its texts, thereby reclaiming a female authorship'
A link with my sourcing of Persian poetry in my work – '..the word tiraz' (sometimes 'taraz') 'forms a verb in Persian that means to weave , to adorn, or to compose poetry'. As a verb stem it also appears in compounds such as 'sukhan taraz' (word weaving, eloquent) that is used to describe poets. From such examples we can see how literary history and textile history were, at one time, interdependent'
Thinking about Crafting Space and its form, I picked up on a reference Kruger makes to a book (which I must order.) by J. Hillis Miller called 'Ariadne's Thread:Story Lines' where 'Miller proposes that a text's architecture is really a labyrinth created from the thread of thought on which words are strung'.
As I am in this new phase of working structurally with text and textile as a way of creating a collectively generated poetic text within a public domain, my heritage as an artist and (half) Iranian woman really starts to make sense.
[1] Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press / London: Associated University Press. 2001
