Writing textile, making text: cloth and stitch as agency for disorderly text

Dormor, Catherine (2014) Writing textile, making text: cloth and stitch as agency for disorderly text. In: New Directions: Examining the Past, Creating the Future. Textile Society of America 14th Biennial Symposium, 10-14 Sep 2014, Los Angeles, CA, USA.. . [Conference or Workshop Item]

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Abstract

This paper focuses upon means and ways in which knowledge gained through textile practice can be expressed using language and imagery drawn from within that practice itself.
In this it draws upon écriture feminine to develop a matrix of knowledge upon and within which text and textile intertwine. Here cloth and stitch are considered as co-agents for a disorderly text that dissolves boundaries between theoretical and practice-based concerns through a process that Bracha Ettinger refers to as ‘borderswerving’ (Ettinger 2006).
In this paper such disorderly text or working in and through body, cloth and stitch, will be addressed through three points for departure: folding, fraying and seaming.
Folding offers a focus upon ways in which the communication of tacit knowledge within practice initiates and generates new understandings and expressions of that tacit knowledge.
The concept of fraying or frayage will be considered in terms of breaking down resistance at the edge, enabling a porosity between practice-based and theoretical perspectives.
Seaming will consider how the processes of making can act as agency for written and aural modes of communication. The material processes of seaming suggest a generative and communicative conceptual-material model.
These three models offer a materialisation and matrixiation of Barthes ‘Text means Tissue’ (1973, p.64), suggesting that the material activities of writing textile and making text are allied and intertwined modes of knowledge-generation. Such a disorderly text offers a space for tacit and communicable knowledge and meaning to mingle.
Cited Texts
Barthes, R., 1973. The Pleasure of the Text, New York: Hill and Wang.
Ettinger, B., 2006. The Matrixial Borderspace, Minneapolis, Minn: University of Minnesota Press.

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