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| INDIAN PRINT FROM THE J. FORBES WATSON COLLECTION OF SPECIMENS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE TEXTILE MANUFACTURERS OF INDIA, LONDON, 1873-1880. Photo by Jolie Stahl. |
I was very lucky to have chanced upon the late February NPR
program, On Being, when Krista Tippett interviewed exhibition
"maker" Ann Hamilton,
professor at Ohio State
University, Columbus, and the person responsible for last year's
exhibition at New York's Park
Avenue Armory. (Hamilton
prefers to be called a "maker" rather than an artist.)
In that huge Armory exhibit, "The Event of a
Thread", New Yorkers were able to
climb onto swings attached to giant white curtains that hung from mile-high vaulted
ceilings. Somehow, as swingers swung, the curtains opened and
closed. Facing the swingers was a row of
stenographers working away on endless rolls of paper, totally unconnected with
the fellow humans visiting the exhibit. It was all quite visceral, and somehow I
didn't want to linger too long.
What intrigued me in the radio interview was the elegant
expression of Hamilton's
theory that thread and textile were both
important forms of communication. She
told Tippett that when she first started making things out of textiles she
thought of the textile as an animated surface that both covers and reveals, a
place of embodied knowledge, the first house of the body.
She recalled body memories of sitting close to her grandmother
as a child, knitting or doing needlepoint as her grandmother read aloud. The rhythm of the two acts were remembered
together. The threads of needlecraft and
the threads of ideas produced the same experience for her. She continues to find a tactile experience in
words.
With me, textiles often evoke a tactile emotion, sometimes a
happy one, sometimes one full of wonder, sometimes a sad one. Examples from J. Forbes Watson volumes of
Indian fabrics, published in 1866, were on display near The Metropolitan
Museum's Antonio Ratti Textile Center,
coordinated with The Met's major exhibit, "Interwoven Globe: The
Worldwide Textile Trade". The
exhibit's long run ended late last year.
Watson was a doctor who traveled to India
with the Bombay Army Medical Service in 1850 and lived there for three years. There
is no accounting for his interest in Indian fabrics. The fabrics he presented in his pattern books
were manufactured in India and "were meant to inspire textile
manufacturers in India and England."
Admittedly the paisley or boteh/buta motif is too
powerful for eastern cultures to keep just to themselves. Shown above, a charming floral with budding
branches that turn into the teardrop motif.
But it is just so hard to see India
at this point (1866), losing what was
left of its industry to a more industrially-savvy country. It was even sadder when I came upon a pattern
book at another library that showed a cotton print of English roses mixed with the
motif, intended to be sold back to the Indian customer.
Still the small exhibit was a welcome one and part of our shared
embodied knowledge. As Hamilton
told Tippett, text and textiles are always woven experientially for her – as
they can be for us all. JP
