The Long Story - or how discussion becomes Art
(The following response is printed with permission of Victoria Slind-Flor of Berkeley, CA. Victoria's post was the catalyst which sparked this project.)
Tonight when I was walking from the BART station to the parking lot, I started thinking about a comment I saw posted on the QuiltArt list today about off-topic discussions. Yes, i suppose that someone who wa reading this list solely for advice on hand dyeing fabrics and corner-mitering techniques would be pretty much uninterested in the last week's worth of filings.
But then, I realized, what folks were doing. And it made me laugh and got me all excited -- as in creating-something excited -- all at once.
I think we were swapping raw images of women's domestic lives, trying to build a body of shared experience so we could do something with it. All those clotheslines and ironed sheets and hubbies in front of the boob tubes and grandmothers' mangles and irish with lace curtains are the real stuff of our lives. And, most importantly, they are part and parcel of our artistic vocabularies.
Oh, that doesn' mean we can't or don't do quilts that comment on atrocities in Bosnia or liberation in South Africa. Or that we're not capable of very fine abstractions and color studies. But we do all these things through the filter of our own life experiences. And, on this list, we are reaching out, testing the water, seeking common grounds, waiting for the shock of recognition, that "oh, yes, I did that, too. And that's just how I felt."
Being freed from that tyranny of the ironing board was a powerful symbol of female emancipation on the new, automatic, washer-and-dryers' 1950s. the Perma-Pressed 1960s, and the (dare I use this now debased term?) women's-liberationist 1970s, and the have-it-all and do-it-all 1980s. I remember seeing the cover of one of the early editions of Ms. Magazine that showed a woman with as many arms as the goddess Kwan Yin, and in each hand was some domestic implement, from iron to toilet plunger to portable mixer.
Anyway, to judge from the very visceral reactions the discussion of ironed sheets has raised, the iron and ironing board are still powerful icons that evoke an incredible range of response. Aha, I though, just the stuff for art. As in art quilt!
I know that many women who are artists hate the thought of "women's art" and would vehemently deny that there are female themes and techniques and approaches to art. But I would also insist that we are products of our own socialization processes, and even though some of us are Ph.D.s in the hard sciences or lawyers or software designers, we have been through some of the common girl-type experiences that leak out in all our work, both the mundane and the artistic.
So I, for one, have enjoyed all the "clothes on the line" postings, having laughed at the "my husband is a couch potato" complaints, and have been nudged by what you guys have been saying about your own lives into compiling my own list of childhood memories that perhaps will be raw materials for my future quilts.
I have also been thinking that it would be really fun to have a group quilt on a theme from our favorite childhood domestic memories. And I can even tell you what I'd put in my block, if someone else came up with the idea of shepherding a group quilt to completion.
It would be an applique block showing my ample-bodied grandmother, her thick and heavy auburn hair wound round her head and secured with tortoiseshell hairpins. She'd by in the kitchen in a house dress with nylons and those funn Cuban-heeled lace-up-the-front black leather shows old ladies used to wear. She'd have her fat freckled arms deep in her silver metal bread bowl -- the one that was so big that all the babies in the family had their first bath in that bowl. And in the bowl would be a great mound of satiny white bread dough, as pneumatic and soft as a baby's bottom, that she would miraculously transform into bread that made all but panis angelicus shrink from the comparison. Her forehead would be streaked with flour, her glasses would be sliding down her nose, and she'd have the diamond wedding brooch she always wore on a chain around her neck pinned to the strap of her floured apron for an extra precaution.
Maybe in your block you'd be running that mangle, or hanging out your clothes, or rolling out pie dough, or embroidering tea towels, or helping bathe your baby brother of sheeling peas or scattering feed for the chickens or planting marigolds, or polishing the silver or setting fence posts or helping change a tire or hanging wallpaper or who knows what.