I’m an internationally exhibited textile artist.

No, really. Listen.

Here’s a little quilt that usually hangs in our hall. (I moved it into better light for the photograph.)

I made it in the summer of 2012 and submitted it for Ireland’s entry to the European Quilt Association exhibition. This exhibition is annual: each member country sends a certain number of quilts (ten, that year), and there’s a theme and a size requirement.

I rather like this quilt

It’s called “Red Cow Roundabout”. Let me tell you about it.

On the outskirts of Dublin, maybe half an hour from my house, squats the Red Cow interchange. It’s a huge junction, where Dublin’s ring road, the M50, crosses one of the country’s main arterial routes, the N7 (there’s a tram line in the mix too).

For the first couple of years after the M50 opened, the Red Cow Roundabout (as it was then) was a monumental bottleneck, its capacity totally inadequate for the volume of traffic inching through. So they redid it from scratch as a spaghetti junction, and now it works a lot better.

Although its official name doesn’t include the word “roundabout” any more, a lot of people still called it that for years, out of habit.

The theme of the EQA exhibition in 2012 was “Crossroads”, and as sometimes happens, the design for my quilt came rushing to mind almost as soon as I heard the theme announced.

There is no roundabout any more. Nor has there been any trace of a red cow in these parts for many a long year. So I put them together in a quilt that combines memory and record-keeping with the notion of journeying forward.

The left-hand section is a quilted map of the junction as it is now (or at least, was in 2012), and on the right you see the reddest-looking cow I could muster.

My quilt was one of the Irish entries in that year’s EQA exhibition. They were shown at the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham, and they then went on a kind of grand tour around Europe, stopping off at various other festivals, guild AGMs, and similar.

So, there you go.

This is a textile art piece, I made it, and it has been exhibited in several countries. Therefore, I’m an internationally exhibited textile artist. Quod erat, I think you’ll find, demonstrandum.

Of course, there’s the voice

The “not really, though” voice. The voice that says I can’t possibly describe myself in these terms until I’ve had, like, a solo exhibition in some venue that no human on the face of this planet has not heard of.

That voice? It has standards. It knows what phrases like “textile artist” and “internationally exhibited” really mean – and no offence, honey, but it’s not one measly little art quilt that just happens to have gone on tour.

Do you belittle your achievements like this?

I’ll be honest with you: I almost deleted this post, because I’m embarrassed about it. I’m afraid you may think I’m puffing up my tiny achievement into “something it’s not”.

(Oh, me. I mean, I love me, but could I please give me a break?)

It’s all about what “counts”, isn’t it?

When it comes to identifying as an artist, some things obviously “count” – the aforementioned solo exhibition, grants and awards, people buying your work (…especially if the price tag covers materials and labour at more than minimum wage…).

Equally, other things probably don’t really “count” – making something from a kit or someone’s step-by-step instructions, doodling curlicues on the back of an envelope during a meeting, darning a worn spot in the elbow of a cardigan.

But there’s a lot of in-between space here. Really, a lot. (To tell you the truth, I had a hard time coming up with things for the “don’t count” list, because I could totally imagine ways in which all of the activities I mentioned could be incorporated as part of an artist’s practice.)

And in that in-between space, there’s a lot of room for unhelpful assumptions.

Someone says they’re an author, and we think, “Oh, like J.K. Rowling.”

They say they’re a painter, and we think, “Oh, like Frida Kahlo.”

They say they’re an actor, and we think, “Oh, like Meryl Streep.”

Then, if we aspire to claim a similar label for ourselves, we adopt the strictest possible criteria for that label. Anything less, we tell ourselves, “doesn’t count”.

It’s a fear thing.

We’re afraid we’ll say, “I’m an artist,” and someone will say, “No you’re not.”

Boom. Crash. Doombiscuits all round.

So who gets to decide what counts?

When it comes to my artistic practice, am I allowed to decide for myself what counts?

Well, am I?

I say I am.

See, now it’s about permission. It’s about mindset. It’s about my entitlement to stand up and tell you about this thing I did, with the implication that it’s a real thing that counts.

Here’s another question

Having read this post, do you believe me when I assert that I am an internationally exhibited textile artist?

If you don’t believe me, why not? What do you believe I would have to do to earn the right to claim this label? Where is your line?

(And forgive me for asking, but how do you propose to enforce it?)

If you do believe me – and this is my real point here – what does that give you permission to say about yourself, and about your work?

Let me tell you a story about a conversation I don’t remember. It was recounted to me years later by a family friend, an old college-mate of my parents.

When I was three, this friend was visiting our house and got talking to me.

“Are you able to count?” she asked. (She’s an economist. They consider such things important.)

I nodded.

“How high can you count?”

“Twenty-seven!” I said proudly.

So I counted to twenty-seven for her. Then she prompted me to think about what might come next. I guessed … “twenty-eight?” And after that … “twenty-nine?”

I wasn’t sure where to go from there, but she told me thirty, and then we counted thirty-one, thirty-two, and so on, together. I don’t know how far we went – maybe fifty.

“There!” the friend said, pleased with herself for having coaxed open the tender blossom of my young mind. “Now how high can you count?”

I paused.

Grinned.

“Twenty-seven!”

Now then, how zen!

I love what this story says about teaching and learning – and how Coaxing Open the Tender Blossoms of Young Minds just isn’t the straightforward process you might believe (if you’d never spent much time in the company of three-year-olds, at least).

Learning happens in its own time.

Ability to parrot is not evidence that learning has happened.

Learning belongs to the learner.

But why twenty-seven?

What was significant about that number?

Was I a mathematical prodigy who had just cubed my own age and decided to stop there for a while?

Really not.

Was it a completely meaningless boundary that I had set for no reason?

Maybe. But…

What occurred to the family friend at the time of our conversation was that my father was twenty-seven. (That’s how I can be sure that I was three. Our birthdays are ten days apart.*)

* All right, clever-clogs, so I’m approximately 97.26% sure that I was three. Happy now?

She speculated that I’d recently learned my father’s age, and just couldn’t conceive of knowing a number that was even more mindbogglingly vast than that.

[Sort of like Saki’s Clovis, in “The Match-Maker”:
   “The crisis came,” returned Clovis, “when she suddenly started the theory that late hours were bad for one, and wanted me to be in by one o’clock every night. Imagine that sort of thing for me, who was eighteen on my last birthday.”
“On your last two birthdays, to be mathematically exact.”
“Oh, well, that’s not my fault. I’m not going to arrive at nineteen as long as my mother remains at thirty-seven. One must have some regard for appearances.”]

Oddly enough, this sounded plausible

I think it’s about reach.

I was comfortable knowing how to count up to twenty-seven. Probably, the tremendous antiquity of my father helped to make it a particularly good number to hang on to. I needed to rest there for a while before I was ready to explore the next bit of the mathematical landscape.

(There’s fear in the mix too, of course – a child’s fear of straying beyond the safe circle of light cast by the family campfire. A familiar fear, and one that remained with me far beyond any usefulness it might have had. That’s a whole nother chest o’ balrogs, however, into which I don’t propose to delve just now.)

I think we do this in our creative lives as well

Intentionally making art – and even more so, intentionally returning to an art-making life in adulthood – is kind of huge.

Taking obvious next steps (such as implying that you think you’ve made good art, submitting pieces to the judgement of others, and so on) can feel a bit like suddenly counting up to fifty.

Reach. And stretch. You don’t go from just-about-touching-your-toes to curling-yourself-into-a-pretzel-at-the-drop-of-a-hat all in one jump.

It’ll come.

Learning happens in its own time.

Here, let’s talk a bit more about the politics of gender and work and art and craft.

Some years ago I started a brave new blog, with the intention of entering the online crafty biz scene as a producer. I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to produce, but I was excited at the prospect of earning an income from my passions and skills.

(Still am, thanks.)

Gradually I developed products and services: I made custom embroideries for a while, sold some patterns, did a bit of teaching. It was all fairly scattered and n00b-like. I didn’t make much money, but I had a lot of fun.

After a couple of years my creative focus shifted, as it tends to: I started painting and went back to writing fiction, and soon my textile-crafts blog no longer felt like home.

More importantly, I realised that despite my deep and abiding love of all forms of textile crafts, producing work to order was emphatically not my thing. So I stopped doing that, and after a while I stopped blogging altogether.

Throughout the experience, I was keenly conscious of the politics associated with textiles – specifically the gender politics – and of inhabiting a slightly uncomfortable space at the intersection of work, leisure, craft, and art.

Of course, all human activities come with politics attached. And yet I sometimes wish I could ignore that and just get on with revelling in my textile fascination. Some people seem to be able to enjoy the fibrous endeavours of themselves and others without getting mired in the loaded questions that spring so readily to my mind.

Loaded Questions?

Like how easily I was able to lay down this work, for one thing.

I’d worried at the outset that when I started to make money from these beloved pursuits, they’d take on a new quality for me and become a chore. Looking back on it, in fact, that’s … not entirely what happened, but it’s not a trillion billion miles from the truth either. At heart I’m a variety-junkie (there are kinder terms), and the daily practicalities of working to a pre-determined formula didn’t suit me at all.

Well now, wasn’t I the lucky one, that I could simply stop?

I chose in the first place to become, you might say, a textile worker, and when it ceased to suit me, I had sufficient privilege that I could choose to withdraw from that space without penalty.

I stopped because I wanted to rediscover my joy in the work itself. So many people, now and in the past, haven’t had that choice. How different their experience must be.

Flashback Sequence

For tens of thousands of years, women of all social strata (and also men, but especially women) have encountered strong pressures – domestic needs, social expectation, plain old coercion – to produce textiles, and have responded in a range of ways, many of them stunningly creative and inspiring.

The relationship between necessity and creativity in textiles is rich and delightful, and yet the history of textile work is largely a history of human exploitation.

I’m thinking of the sweatshop workers of Rana Plaza in Bangladesh, who may well have produced clothes that you and I have worn, before the negligence of their employers cost more than a thousand of them their lives in April 2013.

I’m thinking of their long lineage.

The garment workers of Lawrence, Massachusetts, who marched in 1912 for “bread and roses”.

The mill workers of the Industrial Revolution, inhaling noxious dusts and losing limbs in the relentless jaws of the capitalist machine.

The knitters of Shetland or Aran. Royal embroiderers and weavers and lacemakers. Pieceworkers in every time and place.

Teams of slave weavers in ancient Egypt or Mycenae. The spinners of the Late Stone Age.

The ordinary women who, down the millennia, have had the responsibility for clothing their families, starting from scratch – when “scratch” meant a flock of sheep or a stand of plants.

Choice

I wonder about the interplay between the satisfaction of creating beautiful things and the lack of choice in doing so.

Perhaps, for many people, as for me, textile work has been a positive experience. But doing it from necessity, under greater or lesser degrees of coercion, must add a darker dimension.

Here in Ireland, we had the infamous Magdalene Laundries, where “fallen” women were incarcerated throughout much of the twentieth century and treated with breathtaking inhumanity.

Many of the women were put making elaborate embroidered textiles, for sale at a good price, and they received no pay for their work. A number of years ago, the then Minister for Education and Science, in ruling out any legal redress for the surviving victims, had the gall to refer to these people as “employees”.

No, actually, there’s a different word we use for that setup.

Meanwhile, girls in Ireland’s Industrial Schools were also doing textile work. I quote here from the report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, in a section on girls’ everyday life experiences in the schools:

8.18 Sewing, knitting and decorative needlework were regular semi-recreational activities; several witnesses reported making clerical vestments, as well as socks, jumpers, dresses and school uniforms for co-residents. Specialised needlework and knitting was also undertaken for what witnesses understood was the commercial market and a number of witnesses reported being regularly occupied knitting Aran sweaters, making rugs, embroidering tablecloths, vestments and other cloths for shops and church use.

They used to have these huge tablecloths and I used to have to do embroidery on it and do the designs, I used do the crochet. I used do the vestments, the nuns used give them as gifts to the priests. I used to have to do all the sewing for the girls plus all the knitting during the school’s holidays. Remember I was 14 years old at the time.

8.19 Witnesses reported that mending clothes was a regular occupation in 16 Schools, others gave accounts of lay staff being employed in sewing rooms. In five Schools it was reported that residents darned socks and jumpers for local boys’ Industrial Schools and fee-paying boarding schools.

And here am I

…wondering will I break out a skein of handspun sock yarn next, or do a little decorative patchwork.

Makes me feel like a latter-day Marie Antoinette, donning my fantasy shepherdess costume to go and milk a freshly scrubbed cow in the Trianon gardens.

Of course, it could be argued equally that this in itself is so much middle-class posturing. After all, the essentially non-voluntary nature of most of history’s textile work didn’t prevent the development of a host of substantial and multi-faceted art forms.

Not only that, but it has frequently represented for women a path towards some degree of economic independence – back at least as far as Bronze-Age Mesopotamia, by the way, as absorbingly detailed by Elizabeth Wayland Barber in her brilliant book on the prehistory of textiles, Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years. (Read that.)

We may well imagine, in other words, that textile work is often by no means the worst option available.

I bet it beat washing the nuns’ menstrual cloths with bare hands in cold water, for instance, which is another memory from the Industrial Schools.

We may hope that many of the women and girls who were forced by self-righteous sadists to embroider vestments and knit school socks in the social dustbins of twentieth-century Ireland derived some pleasure from the work itself.

Golden Spindles

Citing Barber again, it turns out that the phenomenon whereby privileged women take a hand in textile work – presumably without overt coercion – is not new either: excavations have on occasion revealed actual, honest-to goodness golden spindles, as in spindles made of gold, in the graves of high-status women.

Although the position of women has obviously undergone various transformations in the meantime, to my mind, these are analogous with our modern-day luxury crafting supplies: hand-painted yarns, gorgeously-coloured knitting needles, designer quilting fabrics, speciality fibres such as banana, soy, or wool from specific breeds of sheep, and the ability to afford organic and/or fairly traded supplies (let’s not forget what a privilege that is).

As rich people in the twenty-first century (look, we have internet access and the leisure to write/read a rambling blog post about textile history: I contend that relatively speaking, we’re rich), our participation in the textile industry, if any, is presumably entirely voluntary.

And yet many of us pick up our modern-day golden spindles and get to work – for fun, for profit, or both.

Plus ça change.

I sometimes wonder what it is about textiles that makes me swoon. (Swoon!)

When I was a child, summer after summer my medievalist academic parents took me and my siblings around the castles, museums, walled towns, and cathedrals of France, Italy, and surrounding countries.

It was marvellous. I loved it.

(My little brother didn’t, so much. One year, on our long drive from Dublin to the Continent, we stopped off in Birmingham to visit his cathedral – by which I mean Villa Park, home ground of his favourite football team – on condition that he then come quietly for the rest of the trip.)

I had a well developed aesthetic hierarchy by the time I was eight or nine

Paintings were all very well but rather dull after the first few rooms-full.

Frescoes were a little more exciting – possibly because antiquity! urgency! egg yolk!

Gilding was pretty, in its place (or breathtaking, in Venice); trompe l’oeil was amusing if done well, and faintly pitiable if not.

Intricate medieval statuary was absorbing and endearing, particularly when my mother explained the stories.

The best bits of cathedrals were the stained glass windows (my god, the colour!) and the patterns – floor tiles, pillar capitals, ceiling bosses, window borders. Those bits were mine. It’s a human thirst, this thirst for pattern, repetition, order: I have it bad.

The Renaissance was already getting a bit too realist for my nine-year-old taste (apart from Italian architecture, which rather thoroughly slakes the thirst I mentioned).

German Baroque was boring in architecture, though utterly arresting in music.

The eighteenth century in general seemed irritatingly modern – although contradictorily, I had a little side-love for Victoriana.

Above all other considerations, though, my absolute favourite places to visit were dwellings – by which of course I mean great houses, châteaux, palazzi: little Léan (following, let it be said, the cultural cues on offer) was an elitist to her gilded core.

And the best bits about dwellings were the textiles

Silk wall coverings. Woven carpets. Massive tapestries. Needlepoint fire screens. Velvet bed hangings. Lace cuffs. Knitted stockings. Embroidered shawls.

Now you’re talking.

House after house, room after room, I’d drink these textiles in. Big picture be damned – what I fiercely craved was the perspective of the maker.

Frowning in a concentration that shut out the rest of the world, I’d lean in as close as I was allowed, close enough to see how the individual threads were arranged. My fingers would tingle, and I’d imagine the gestures and procedures that had resulted in the piece – try to guess at the techniques.

Machines were disappointing: for me, the work of the hands was essential to the mystique of the whole thing. Even looms were slightly outside my comfort zone – perhaps because I couldn’t imagine having one of my own.

(By contrast, I already owned most of the tools I’d have needed to make many of the things I saw.)

I suffered pangs – pangs! – when I learned that my all-time favourite tapestries, the enigmatic series known as La Dame à la Licorne (the Lady and the Unicorn), were woven – and that in fact, my understanding of the word “tapestry” had been slightly warped (see what I did there?) by the Bayeux Tapestry, which is embroidered.

In any case, with all my ill informed little heart I wished that I’d lived back then, in the (imaginary, composite) past, when I could have devoted my days to this astonishing union of function and beauty.

Home

Looking back from my current vantage point it’s clear that what I was connecting with was the domestic.

It’s a question of scale, perhaps – and familiarity. The textiles, in particular, were alive for me in a way that vast paintings of martyrdoms, suits of armour, jewel-studded monstrances, were not. I think it’s about home.

Domestic spaces, domestic textiles, were primarily and centrally a feminine concern throughout this period of European history (and beyond, obviously). Without my ever articulating it, the people I pictured making the objects that so touched me were generally female.

I identified with these imagined historical women through the work of their hands, and when I worked on stitched projects of my own, I felt part of a rich and complex tradition – despite knowing almost nothing about it.

I know more now about the textiles that bewitched me then.

I know a little (a very little) about how they were produced, and about the kinds of lives the people who made them might have led.

I’ve come to appreciate that the history we learn is usually biased by power and privilege, and that textile history, being broadly linked to women’s history, is affected by this. I know something about the politics of luxury.

Everything I’ve learned about textiles has consolidated my fascination, even as it adds complexity to my understanding.

A textile piece, no matter how dull and unpromising, will still drag me across a room like a magnet – while treasures like La Dame à la Licorne utterly explode my head.

Textiles are home to me, for good or ill, and at the end of the day it’s still all about the emotional hit.

Very little isn’t, when you think about it.