Succumb Drawings/Paintings

Succumb
All works are 18 x 24 inches
Graphite and Guache on Handmade Abaca Paper

This work is part of a long-term project Merletti/Lace, which has become increasingly important to my artistic production in the last three years. Begun in 2012, it explores the history and labor of handmade and machine made textiles in Italy and America. It also sources an earlier body of work Embroideries (2008) and my history of photographing the women I worked with in a textile recycling factory in Charlotte, North Carolina (1990).

This work addresses gendered labor and the difficult questions raised by textile traditions, including lacemaking, embroidery and textile manufacturing at the turn of the century. This ongoing project provokes a dialogue about authorship and women’s labor through the production of large-scale drawings, paintings, and video based on the production of handmade lace and mechanical textile production. These works reposition the handmade objects of anonymous women in relation to the human body, social status, economics and mechanical reproduction through changes in scale, context, medium and design. I have also begun to compare and reinterpret in these works the physical cardboard patterns which are used in the production of handmade bobbin lace and textile machines of the early 1900’s.

Handmade Lace

Pattern for mechanical textile reproduction

The drawings give a place in history to the early work of women and men who labored in the handmade and mechanical production of textiles. It is an alternative way of exploring the gendered economics of labor, inter-generational knowledge, problematic power structures surrounding textile production, authorship of these objects, and textiles as an archive of our personal, economic and social histories.

The Succumb series was produced during the summer of 2014 in Spello, and Foligno, Italy. I spent time in Italy listening intently to the handmade production of bobbin lace and mechanical reproduction of textiles in Sansepolcro, Anghiari, and Bastardo, Italy. I think of these drawings in addition to their relationship to textiles as musical scores based on the idea that noise and random sounds are music, and there is no silence.

All works are 18 x 24 inches

Graphite and Guache on Handmade Abaca Paper

You can click on the images to see them larger.