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Abstract
In 1987 Virago Press published Women and Craft. Su Richardson was one of the co-editors and contributed an interview with Gaie Davidson called “Crocheted Strategies: A New Audience for Women’s Work.” The book was an outcome of the Feminist Arts News 1981 “Craft” issue which raised a number of questions about the relative status of crafts and arts and the value-level derived from women’s assigned status as “other” than artist. In turn, this emerged out of Feministo, a postal art project instigated by Kate Walker from 1975–1978. Women who trained in art schools in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Su Richardson, Monica Ross, and Walker, communicated with each other in the media of domestic crafts, sewing, knitting, and crochet to represent their lives and work from within the home.
Alexandra M. Kokoli, curator of the exhibition of Richardson’s work “Burnt Breakfast” and other Works (2012), wrote in the press release of the same title that:
Su Richardson’s homemade objects explore domesticity, femininity and their mutual implication from a distinctly feminist point of view. The exhibition included the iconic crocheted ‘full English’, in which the womanly skill of crochet is used against the grain, to express in a humorous manner a growing dissatisfaction with patriarchal gender roles, and also to challenge the hierarchical division between art and craft.
This article explores the relevance of these ideas in the context of the recent resurgence in craft, particularly in textiles and particularly amongst the indie crafters and activists who are able to refer to feminist histories and practices yet not feel bound by them. On the other hand, handcrafting can be mobilized as a statement on domestic roles firmly based within the language of empowerment and enacted through collaborative practice-based work encompassing several disciplines, social media and public engagement. Forty years on there is another kind of news from the crafts community, propelled by social media and a renewed interest in the politics of crafting but not necessarily the crafting of politics.
Acknowledgements
With thanks to Holly Tebbutt, the best friend and copy editor I know.
Notes
1. Spare Rib was a second-wave feminist magazine in the UK that emerged from the counter culture of the late 1960s as a consequence of meetings involving, amongst others, Rosie Boycott and Marsha Rowe. It was published between 1972 and 1993. Archives at the University of Sussex and the British Library.
2. For a good account of the differences between the feminist movements in Great Britain and the United States, see Gamble (Citation2001: 29–40).
3. See Broude (Citation1980: 83–87). Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party was first shown in London in 1984. Further references can be found in The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage, first published in 1979 by New York: Double Day/Anchor Publishing. The Dinner Party is now on permanent display at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. The sexual division of labor, craft, and class were just some of the aspects of women’s work in the 1970s. In 1975, Kay Hunt, Mary Kelly and Margaret Harrison organized an exhibition, Women and Work: A Document on the Division of Labour in Industry for the South London Art Gallery, London. Harrison, whose work Homeworkers was purchased by TATE in 2013, advocated strong political discourse as the only effective means of fighting for workers’ and women’s rights. She began to research Homeworkers when the Equal Pay Act came into force in the UK in December 1975. Harrison worked with the National Campaign for Homeworkers in London for two years and interviewed 150 women working in a metal box factory in Bermondsey in South London. The canvas includes items such as gloves, brooches, buttons, and safety pins, flanked by their selling price, their production time, and the money paid to their makers. The seven hands painted at the top symbolize the manual toil involved in piecework.
4. For more information on which exhibitions were held, including Women and Textiles, and The Subversive Stitch, please see the excellent section about exhibitions in Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock (Citation1987: 185–260).
5. See also the essays by Phil Goodall, "Feministo: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman”, 206; Roszika Parker, "Portrait of the Artist as a Housewife", 207–210; Monica Ross, "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman: A Postal Event", 211; and Phil Goodall, "Growing Point/Pains in 'Feministo’", 213–214, all in Parker and Pollock (Citation1987).
6. Monica Ross, presentation for the 347 min conference, held in conjunction with the Whitechapel exhibition Live in Your Head, January‒March 2000, revised for the Women Artists’ Library (September 5, 2000: 5).
7. Su Richardson (b.1947 South Shields, Tyne and Wear) lives and works in Birmingham. Richardson moved to Birmingham as a secondary school art teacher in the 1970s. Around this time she met Monica Ross and Phil Goodall, who together formed the Birmingham Women’s Art Group. Group exhibitions include: Issues (curator Lucy Lippard), ICA, London (1980); Alternative Images of Men, Bakehouse Gallery, London (1980); Midlands View, Stoke Museum and Art Gallery (1980); and Women and Textiles, Battersea Arts Centre (1983). Prior to this Richardson co-organized the Women’s Postal Art Event Feministo: Representations of the Artist as Housewife at the ICA, London, 1977, which toured nationally and internationally.
8. Rowbotham's seminal book, (Citation1973), Hidden from History: 300 Years of Women's Oppression and the Fight Against It, shows how class and sex, work and the family, personal life and social pressures have shaped and hindered women's struggles for equality.
9. Counterculture Crochet was a daylong seminar held on July 6, 2012 at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. This event accompanied the exhibition “Burnt Breakfast” and other work, curated by Alexandra M Kokoli in collaboration with Althea Greenan of The Women’s Art Library/ MAKE, and Jenny Doussan, Goldsmiths Textile Gallery. This essay is a revised version of the paper presented at that event and extended for the College Art Association Annual Conference, Chicago, February 2014.
10. For the full review, see Rozsika Parker’s "Portrait of an Artist as a Housewife", Spare Rib 7 (1977, 5–8).
11. N. Paradoxa appears to be the only exception, mainly distributing their articles online. For more information please see: http://web.ukonline.co.ukln.paradoxa.
12. See http://allmyindependentwomen.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/su-richardson-burnt-breakfast-and-other.html, posted by Carla Cruz, accessed 24/02/15; and https://unpopularcultureblog.wordpress.com/2012/09/03/last-chance-to-see-burnt-breakfast-by-su-richardson-deptford-town-hall-pics/#more-534, accessed 24/02/15.
13. See Johnson, Pamela, "Art or Women’s Work? News from the Knitting Circle," in Oral History, Special Issue on the Crafts, 1990: 50–53 in which Anne Lydiatt, Lynn Malcolm, Kate Russell and myself were interviewed as contributors. The “knitting circle” was how one of Kate’s male colleagues described her textile department.
14. See https://twitter.com/craftivists, accessed 25/02/15.
15. See http://www.craftcommunities.com/, accessed 25/02/15.
16. For a discussion of possible reconfigurations of community, and second-wave feminism, see Martin and Mohanty (Citation1986: 191–212); Benston (Citation1980: 119–129). For a discussion around creative economy from within the home, a located site of physical production, see Agnes and Kate Walker (1987: 27). Citation
17. See https://www.etsy.com/shop/craftivistcollective, accessed 01/07/14.
18. In conversation at the Craft and Social change conference, Wednesday May 8, 2013 at Toynbee Hall, London, funded by Norwegian Crafts and an event produced by Art Projects and Solutions. See also Sarah Corbett, https://craftivist-collective.com/our-story/ (accessed 02/07/14) . See also “A Little Book of Craftivism” (2013), https://www.etsy.com/shop/craftivistcollective (accessed 02/07/14).
19. One example is Soweto: A Patchwork of Our Lives, an exhibition of Textile Arts by the Zamani Soweto Sisters, Brixton Art Gallery, London, May 14 to June 24, 1986. The Sisters were a collective of many groups of women living in various part of Soweto during Apartheid who made quilts, fabric collage, and other textile crafts to support themselves and their families.
20. The American blogger Betsey Greer’s interview in the UK national daily newspaper The Guardian on May 29, 2006 revealed the extent of how widespread craftivism has become on a global scale (see her website, craftivism.com). She believes that each time you participate in crafting you are making a difference; whether it is a critical statement against useless materialism or by producing items for charity making a public statement about your willingness to fight for causes you believe in.
21. "Sewing Notions" was a selected reading as part of the Cut on the Bias Workshop held at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada between June 3–5, 2011. Organized by the editors of the special issue of the Journal, I was one of the international participants.
22. The prevalence of collaborative and collective practices within socially engaged art has been widely discussed by art historians including Grant H. Kester (in terms of “dialogical aesthetics”), Claire Bishop (in terms of “participation”) and Gregory Sholette (in terms of “dark matter”). Key references on the subject include Kester (Citation2004); Bishop (Citation2006); Stimson and Sholette (Citation2007); and Thompson (Citation2012). In their excellent book, Group Work, the Chicago-based collective Temporary Services interviews numerous groups about the actual process of working together. Resonating closely with Naomi Klein, the editors declare their intent to dismantle the “hyper-individualism, upon which so much of the art world relies… we subscribe to an alternative, which is more open, and non-exclusive, and strives to be honest about both the human costs created as a result of the production of art, and about the existence of underlying power structures within all our relationships” (Temporary Services, Group Work, Printed Matter, New York, 2007: 8).
23. See Katie King’s blog, http://affectdesign.blogspot.co.uk/ (accessed 14/06/12). Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a Fellow of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), Katie King’s interdisciplinary scholarship is located at a juncture of feminist technoscience studies, intersectional digital cultures, and media studies.
24. Katie King performed her emergent knowledge systems at the seminar "Knotting in common: a discussion about knowledge making, collective practice and working with fibers in the age of the 'new aesthetic'," Goldsmiths, University of London, June 15, 2012 supported by Intel and the Crafts Council and organized by the Departments of Anthropology, Sociology, Computing and the University of Warwick.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Janis Jefferies
Janis Jefferies is Professor of Visual Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is a founder member of Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, and is researching electronic communication in cloth and the “The Re-Enchantment of Cloth” (with Barbara Layne, Concordia University, Canada). Recent publications include: “Pattern, Patterning, Probe” in Inventive Methods: The Happening of the Social, edited by Celia Lury and Nina Wakeford (Routledge, 2012). She was co-curator of the Hangzhou Triennial of Textile Art in China (2013) and is one of three editors, with Diana Wood Conroy (Australia) and Hazel Clark (USA) of The Handbook of Textile Culture (Bloomsbury, 2015).