masochistes

april 2024

Notes

There is a joyful masochism I find in art and craft. Trained fine and untrained vernacular artists alike dedicate ourselves to our practice and show off the scars of our craft.

There is a common belief across cultures that makers sow our souls, lives, and spirits into our work. It’s  particularly clear in vernacular textile arts, in which it is fairly common to create intentional hidden ‘mistakes,’ to leave a hole for the soul to escape - particularly in Hmong textile practice and crochet lacemaking. This highlights the labor and meaning that went into creation— such extreme dedication that your own soul might be trapped in the piece and never return to you. Onlookers evaluate the vernacular arts through the commitment of time and pain to a work of art, which is often parallel to this idea of the vanity of dress. However, this tendency towards the social valuation of pain isn’t always personal, and we can’t blame the individual. External and societal pressures dictate these values, expecting pain and time as inputs to receive praise or be valued. We praise women who put in more effort, even when their looks inhibit their comfort and ease of going about their day. With folk crafts, we praise the amount of time a piece might have taken, and as crafters (who are often women) we often take the most pride in the amount of labor we put in. Both sides of this exchange use time and pain as the key means of assigning value, an idea that only truly entered the subconscious mind in the age of industry. 

When efficiency comes before all, true dedication is a foreign, and therefore valuable, trait. 

I find myself falling victim to these ideas constantly. When engaged with an idea, I lose priority of my own health, comfort, even basic needs.  - I had evolved a practice, knitting with yarn, that already pained my injured wrist. My replacement of yarn for copper only causes more inflammation, but my excitement for the medium forces dedication, and I sow my own soul into it, through the time and pain I put into the work. The knit I create contains this, each stitch’s uneven and off-kilter quality showing the history of my hands on the wire. There is a beauty to this pain, evidently a part of why artists are so often willing to embrace and highlight this quality of making.

Medical gear, in its constriction, discomfort, and conversely its support, brought on by this push and pull of dedication hurting and impassioning artists, is a key motif in this collection. Historical fashion that has injured and hindered women (and the dichotomy of choice versus pressure in dress), vernacular textile arts including lacemaking, intentional errors, visual showcases of time and damage, and my own practice of knitting with copper are some of the translations of my ideas featured visually in this collection.