How do we capture the body?
If you’ve been reading my past few newsletters (thanks for being here by the way!), you’ll know that I’m playing around with making parts of my body out of fibres, on my backstrap loom.
When weaving, this movement of me and the loom together, when recreating the body, in some ways draws the movement of the sinews, of the lines of the woven body. With my own flesh, I’m making a different kind of textile flesh.
Part of making my woven flesh, also involves me tidying up and sewing my different parts of the body together.
At the Unravel exhibition at the Barbican back in the spring, I saw this quote:
“To sew is to puncture, to mend, to bind together, to attend a split in an attempt to bring fragments into a whole”
As the needle meets the material, slips through a thread, a type of healing takes place, a mending, a structure and a sense of things being put together.
Textiles as part of our lives
If you think about it, textiles are part of everyday routines. They are in close contact with our bodies and our homes, for example we bandage wounds or breakages with cloth. This physicality of a textile makes the experience of it very personal.
As I was doomscrolling through Instagram last week, I came across the artist Alina Szapocznikow for the first time. She’s a Jewish Polish artist who survived the concentration camps in the 2nd world war. Her whole sculptural work is centred around the body, and I became completely mesmerised by her work, as we were touching on some similar ideas (she even made some giant sculptures of her stomach which I absolutely loved).
Szapocznikow describes her objects as “niezgrabne” which means clumsy, not very proportional. I found this reassuring, as that’s quite a good way of describing how my woven objects are coming out; it’s a constant reminder that as hard as we try, we can’t recreate nature.
She speaks of our bodies as gestures that are available to us all, bonding us together as human beings, existing human beings. She wants to capture the feeling of the body, in all its crevices - kind of like a way of making our mark on earth.
Szapocznikow says that with our bodies, we can capture even the fleeting moments - our experiences, the absurdity of our lives, the paradoxes. Our bodies hold those marks, in some ways the imprints - in her case literally, as she casted her own body parts and those around her.
She says:
“Despite everything, I persist in trying to fix in resin the traces of our body: I am convinced that of all manifestations of the ephemeral, the human body is the most vulnerable, the only source of joy, all suffering, and all truth.”
Spot the difference!
This idea of the experience of flesh, how it carries our memories and stories, is something that we all share without realising.
As I endeavour to remake my own flesh with textiles, I’m reminded that the material I’m using connects me back with their source - nature. The very textile that I’m weaving, sewing, remaking, all keeps connecting to the physicality and materiality of the body as the subject matter; the natural material forming the fleshiness of my natural body.
This earthiness of the material, the body involved in the making during this ancient and physical ritual of weaving on a backstrap loom: it all connects me to the makers of the past and the future.
I leave you with a quote from one of my favourite artists:
“For me, I hope for a future that’s fleshy and messy and visceral and tactile and flung far away from cyborgs and transhumanist tropes.” Lucy McRae
So here’s to the fleshy, the tactile and the messy.
As always, thanks for reading!
Alex x
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