The Power of Quiet: Re-making Affective Amateur and Professional Textiles Agencies

Abstract

This article advocates an enlarged understanding of the benefits of manual creativity for critical thinking and affective making, which blurs the boundaries, or at least works in the spaces between or beyond differential definitions of amateur and professional craft practices and identities. It presents findings from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project: Co-Producing CARE: Community Asset-based Research & Enterprise (https://cocreatingcare.wordpress.com). CARE worked with community groups (composed of amateur and professional textile makers) in a variety of amateur contexts: the kitchen table, the community cafe, the library, for instance, to explore how critical creative making might serve as a means to co-produce community agency, assets and abilities. The research proposes that through “acts of small citizenship” creative making can be powerfully, if quietly, activist. Unlike more familiar crafts activism, such “acts” are not limited to overtly political and public manifestations of social action, but rather concern the micro-politics of the individual, the grass roots community and the social everyday. The culturally marginal, yet accessible nature of amateur crafts becomes a source of strength and potential as we explore its active, dissenting and paradoxically discontented aspects alongside more frequently articulated dimensions of acceptance, consensus and satisfaction. Informed by work on cooperation, DIY citizenship, critical making, and theories of embodied and enacted knowledge, the authors interpret findings from selected CARE-related case studies to explicate various ways in which “making” can make a difference by: providing a safe space for disagreement, reflection, resolution, collaboration, active listening, questioning and critical thinking, and offer quiet, tenacious and life-enhancing forms of resistance and revision to hegemonic versions of culture and subjectivity.

Keywords:

• activism
• amateur
• craft
• co-creation
• community
• textiles

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Connected Communities Programme for their support, and our project stakeholders, consultants, advisers, collaborators and participants for their expertise, enthusiasm, time and commitment.

Funding

This work was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) under [grant number AH/K006789/1]: Co-Producing CARE: Community Asset-based Research & Enterprise.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fiona Hackney

Fiona Hackney is Professor of Fashion Textiles Theories at the University of Wolverhampton. Fiona’s research focuses on sustainable dress, social design, gender and design, crafting, amateur and participatory practice, interwar women’s magazines, community heritage, critical making health and wellbeing. She is currently working on a monograph, Women’s Magazines and the Feminine Imagination: Opening Up a New World for Women in Interwar Britain (Forthcoming 2017, IB Tauris) and an edited collection for Edinburgh University Press (2017), as well as a number of articles and chapters on aspects of critical making for scholarly publications.

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Hannah Maughan

Hannah Maughan’s research interests focus on the past and future of embroidery; through traditional and contemporary making and materials with hand and digital processes and through social and cultural context, considering gender, storytelling and narrative. In 2016 Hannah received the Embroiderers’ Guild Beryl Dean Award for Teaching Excellence in recognition of her subject commitment, her significant contribution to the teaching of embroidery at HE level and for salvaging Hazel Sims’ unique embroidery legacy for the University archive.

Sarah Desmarais

Sarah Desmarais is a textile designer maker and crafts researcher.  Her research interests include textile practice and crafts for health. Her current research, funded by Arts Council England, explores the pedagogic relevance of slow making and slow material technologies in art school contexts, in relation to an important collection of katagami (Japanese stencils traditionally used with a rice paste resist medium) in the collection of the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture in London.