Since I have only recently entered back into the art and craft universe, I am kinda late to the discussion. I’ve been checking out back issues of Fiberarts magazine from the library–sorry to other patrons for hoarding them all! It is a great magazine–accessible and informative. I love that they feature student work, that they value up and coming artists as much as the establishment. I’ve been relearning my feminist art history. How fiber art has always been a more traditionally female art form and visual themes have tended to be of the domestic nature. The transition from fiber art as mere craft to an art form was initially tackled in the early 1970’s with artists like Magdalena Abakanowicz and Lenore Tawney.
“The idea of using fabric as an art material both summed up the iconoclasm of the 1970s and established a context within which to mount a feminist challenge to the way art history honored certain materials and certain processes instead of others” — from Women, Art and Society by Whitney Chadwick.
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During college, I studied sculpture and painting. I’m not sure that I had any specific goals at that time, but saw what I was doing as fine art and that if I wanted to be an artist I would have to compete in the established art world. I had the same male professor for three and a half years. I held his opinions in high regard…and he was very opinionated. At the end of one quarter, another female student and I were showing the work we had individually generated over the past three months. He took one look at our exhibition and made the blanket statement that everything we had done was “faint-hearted.” I was seriously crushed (I think I even got teary–damn-it!) and proceeded to seek out his approval for the rest of my college career. By the time I graduated I felt so hemmed in about what I thought I should be creating that I painting myself into a box. I couldn’t see how I could possibly produce any work unless it adhered to this very specific vision of what I thought I should make. So, after a few more years of producing paintings that I didn’t enjoy making–I gave it up. I wasn’t going to be an artist–forget it. I had lost the joy of creating and, more destructively, I turned away from my own instincts.
My return to art-making has been organic. Arriving initially as craftmaking with which I could busy myself, then as a tool for expression. I still struggle to create work that doesn’t adhere to a specific theme. I want to make things based on my postpartum experiences but remind myself to not be to hemmed in by that theme. If I want to embroider a bee then I should embroider a bee—I am learning to go with what feel right within me.
The 2006 fall issue of Fiberarts featured an article called “Pop Art” that captures why I am so excited by the current fiber arts movement. “Whether out of a desire of ‘do-it-yourself’ as a reaction to the hypermarketing of mass product that is a side effect of today’s global economy, or out of a reappraisal of the position accorded the “domestic arts” as compared to fine arts after first-, second- and third-wave feminism, renewed interest in crafting has grown steadily in the past few years….The producers, for the most part, are fully conscious of the prior associations of crafting and fiber arts with home, hearth, and women, and seek to elevate crafts from the ghetto of “domestic arts” and covert negative associations into appreciation of tangible, useful, beautiful items.”
I can work with mediums that feel right to me, within an exciting artistic movement, and use themes that speak to me as a woman andas an artist. I am free to be as “faint-hearted” as I damn well want! Doesn’t that expression feel just a little bit misogynist to you? It’s only taken me a dozen years to see that clearly.
