The needle arts are traditionally associated with the decorative, domestic, and feminine. Stitching the Self sets out to expand this narrow view, demonstrating how needlework has emerged as an art form through which both objects and identities – social, political, and often non-conformist – are crafted.Bringing together the work of ten art and craft historians, this illustrated collection focuses on the interplay between craft and artistry, amateurism and professionalism, and re-evaluates ideas of gendered production between 1850 and the present. From quilting in settler Canada to the embroidery of suffragist banners and the needlework of the Bloomsbury Group, it reveals how needlework is a transformative process – one which is used to express political ideas, forge professional relationships, and document shifting identities.With a range of methodological approaches, including object-based, feminist, and historical analyses, Stitching the Self examines individual and communal involvement in a range of textile practices. Exploring how stitching shapes both self and world, the book recognizes the needle as a powerful tool in the fight for self-expression.Building on the work of Heather Pristash, Inez Schaechterle, and Sue Carter Wood, who have suggested that needlework offers a “space in which to stitch not only a seam, but also a self,” this collection of essays complicates the binaries that have shaped the divide between modern art history and material culture. In response to Michael Yonan’s call for greater efforts to bridge these fields, both ostensibly “discipline[s] of objects,” the authors in this volume examine needleworks from the nineteenth century to the present. This volume challenges the divisions that result from an uncritical acceptance of the social and historical conditions that determined realms of production and display by not only attending to objects that have fallen outside the scope of traditional art history, but by placing these works—a settler quilt, a psychiatric patient’s embroidery, a suffrage banner—on the same continuum as contemporary fiber art. These works are knit together here through agency and intention, and in particular through a consideration of how makers plied their needles in order to position the self differently—to fashion the self as an artist, educator, activist, or work of art; to forge new social ties, whether familial, professional, or political; or to recall identities lost or left dormant through processes of dramatic personal change and displacement. In doing so it draws upon an important thread in material culture scholarship: that the act of making simultaneously transforms the material world as well as the maker.

Stitching the Self: Identity and the Needle Arts PDF

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