Why can’t textiles be art? That is the question I would pose instead.
Over the past decades, there has been a growing movement to question what art is. While textiles have a turbulent history of acceptance and denial as an art form, it is growing in acceptance. I would therefore argue, it is up to us as artists who work with textiles to pull our preferred medium up by its bootstraps and push it into the realm of fine art. Don’t sit around and moan that your work is not seen as art. Make it art by presenting it as art. By believing it is art. By changing the perception of art!
[the artist] disturbs, upsets, enlightens, and he [she] opens ways for a better understanding. Whereas those who are not artists are trying to close the book, [the artist] opens it, shows there are still more pages possible.
Robert Henri, The Art Spirit (1923/2007, p. 11)
Textiles are versatile in form and meaning. They can evoke memories of generations of women working with cloth to create practical, serviceable and beautiful items. Textiles are part of the Industrial Revolution, when cloth became a manufactured product that was more utilitarian than meaningful. And they epitomise the absorption of domestic community incidentals of conversation, love, family, and stories told over needle and cloth.
Textiles, after all, accompany us on nearly every step of life: We are born and swaddled, buried in shrouds; most of us are even conceived between sheets.
Camhi. L. Some of the Most Provocative Political Art is Made With Fibers.
New York Times Style Magazine (2018).
Textiles are also one of the most potent art mediums precisely because they cross many boundaries. As an art form, textiles can activate social change through the political potential of stitch (C. Barber, Outside: Activating cloth to enhance the way we live,2014), or tell stories of the ‘beating heart of marginalized identity’ (Akers, T. How to sound really smart on textile art and progressive politics (2020). Textiles can break down barriers between cultures and between communities. So, if we view art as ‘a response to social, religious, political, economic, and aesthetic stimuli’ (Anthropology: The Four Fields. The Arts. 2008), then textiles sit bang in the middle of that view.
By Cheryl Cook