A Matter of Life and Death

Abstract

The Paracas textile, dating from 300 to 200 BC and held in the British Museum, is one of our earliest examples of socially engaged or socially enacted cloth. It presents us with an insight into ritual, social value, and care at one of the most significant moments of a human life—one’s death. The highly intricate woven and stitched fragments form part of a mummy bundle, a decorative cloth swathed in layer upon layer of cotton fabric. This article will explore three moments in history across a timeline of nearly 2,000 years, beginning with the fragments that remain of the Paracas textile, remnants of an early Peruvian society. It will then move on to explore the patchwork quilts of the North American settlers and conclude with the signature textiles produced by civilian internees in the Far East internment camps in World War II. It will examine the active use of cloth and its ability to punctuate our human lives, drawing on archival sources and oral histories to explore this idea further.

Keywords:

• socially engaged
• socially enacted
• cloth
• ritual
• value
• life
• death

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Penny Macbeth

Penny Macbeth is Dean of Manchester School of Art, at Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom. Her research examines cloth as a catalyst for change, hope, and activism, and specifically focuses on the practitioner’s engagement with cloth through a series of case studies and evaluations of her own and others’ community outreach projects. She co-convened the international conference “Outside: Activating Cloth to Enhance the Way We Live” with the artist and academic Claire Barber. The conference explored the complex and multifaceted relationship humans have with cloth, and examined the constantly evolving fields of expression outside traditional gallery, institutional, or campus settings. This work was developed into a co-edited book of the same title published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2014. Since then, Macbeth has written various papers and book chapters, such as “Craft in Unexpected Places” which she co-wrote with Barber and published in the Journal of Craft Research in 2015, exploring cloth’s value and what cloth represents as a social and symbolic object. She is currently collaborating with Barber on a significant curatorial project.

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