The Fabric of Society

Taking a look around the Say No! exhibit at the Wardlaw Museum on North Street, the first thing you’ll notice is the number of tapestries, cloth, and artworks straight off the embroidery wheel that adorn the small room’s walls. Amongst the more-expected short films, the textiles are what shone out at me. It appears, at least to the curators, that female resistance (‘Art, Activism and Feminist Refusal’, according to the exhibit’s tagline) is best displayed through the most traditional methods of ‘womanly’ art: embroidery. The Bayeux tapestry, depicting the Norman Conquest of 1066, is the most famous example of artwork made by a group of women. The Say No! exhibit, however, focuses on more marginalised groups of people, and more marginalised or subjugated topics being displayed on tapestry or through weaving.

The textile trade as a tradition, however, is perhaps not as ‘womanly’ as it seems. Even as the OED defines embroidery as a “pastime”, rather than elitist skill and profession, which it has been for women for over 500 years, the commodification and globalisation of cotton, linen, and thread has brought the ‘hobby’ far from its roots in collective, female work. The V&A Dundee had a plethora of ‘jute’ on display last time I visited, a trade that kept Dundee and the Tay area alive in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It displayed beautiful embroidery on these burlap sacks when they no longer served a purpose, stretched and held at eye level to accentuate their intricacy. The stories of Dundee were sewn into these already intricately woven cloths — all by women. 

However, the people who made surmountable profits off the jute trade were not the women who worked so diligently and tirelessly, but the buyers of the plant itself from the region that jute was grown: West Bengal and Assam in India. Indeed, the British East India Company had trading ties to this region for jute from the late seventeenth century onwards — though the extent to which corruption and unjust trading practices amongst other, more sinister repercussions occurred is not widely known. Certainly, the mill owners, all British — whether in India or Dundee — were those who benefitted from the trade. 

Even in this tiny corner of Fife, then, there is growing evidence that embroidery and weaving, traditionally the pursuits of women, have been commodified and stripped of their symbolic, community-based meanings. Outside of museum curation, embroidery is widely thought of as a hobby — one that serves little purpose in a world rapidly consumed by ‘new’, ‘quick’, and ‘cheap’. Embroidery, even as a hobby, requires immense concentration and skill. As I learnt from watching my grandmother, it is not mindless (and as I later learnt when she attempted to teach me her craft, it is not exactly mindful). Indeed, the sense that it is a relaxing, healing hobby is one disputed by the long history of women, fictional or real, who have used weaving, embroidery and textile-craft as methods of resistance. Miriam Schapiro’s collages of textiles, which she called “femmages”, and Judy Chicago’s gynocentric The Dinner Party, are two such inspirations for the Say No! exhibit, where explicitly marginalised voices are on display. In advertisement for one of the textiles workshops held at the Wardlaw Museum in February, Homer’s Penelope from the Odyssey is alluded to as an ancient example of weaving and tapestry being used to put voice to the unsavoury, undesired, or unspeakable. It is exactly this which embroidery puts a light to, and exactly that which makes a hegemonic audience uncomfortable. The exhibit is powerful in its use of textile, precisely because it is so underlooked and underappreciated. The banners that litter the edges of the room are all inviting the museum’s visitors, in plain, beautiful lettering, to Say No!

Illustration by Janya Malkani