ALL THINGS ARE DELICATELY INTERCONNECTED [1]

Excerpted from the written component of my thesis for Master of Fine Arts (Visual Art), 2019.

Throughout the decades of her writing, seminal textile artist Anni Albers emphasises a lack of connection with materials and tactility as a problem that needs to be addressed. In 1965, she bemoans: ‘Our materials come to us already ground and chipped and crushed and powdered and mixed and sliced, so that only the finale in the long sequence of operations from matter to product is left to us: we merely toast the bread. No need to get our hands into the dough.’ [2]

Almost halfway through my Masters project—coinciding with the release of the UN report on the climate crisis in September 2018—I began to seriously reconsider the materials I was working with. On an emotive level, textiles are tactile and bodily, soft and reassuring; they speak of repair and healing and care and transformation. They connect us to history, religion, ancestral knowledge, birth and death. But contemporary textile production is toxic. The apparel and footwear industries contribute to 8.1% of fossil fuel emissions globally; as a 2018 article points out, this is more than the entire European Union. The cotton industry, for example, is bloated by huge amounts of water—over 2000L of irrigation per litre of non-organic cotton lint—and pumped full of pesticides. Microfibres of polyester—essentially plastic—clog the ocean and soil. The biggest problems occur at the stage in which fibre is dyed and finished, accounting for 36% of emissions and involving toxic synthetic dyes. The waste from this process can often enter water sources, turning entire rivers the colour of the next season’s fashion lines.

This is not new information, but it has reached a critical peak. Everything is interconnected; every possible action triggers a chain of global reactions. It had never before occurred to me that my comforting cotton embroidery threads could be wreaking such havoc. Once I realised this, it was clear that a practice about care, attention and hope for the future must address the problems implicit in its materials.

I began to source un-dyed threads in natural fibres, produced as ethically as I could find, although it is nearly impossible to trace the convoluted journeys of textile growth, harvesting and processing. I dyed these threads and fabrics with plants: I saved kitchen waste like onion skins and avocado pits, picked mint and rosemary from the tangles overtaking my garden, eucalyptus leaves and bark from trees on my street. I planted native indigo seedlings so that one day I can make blue-green dye from the leaves. To make an iron solution, I collected handfuls of rusty nails from the ground around the art school.

I made up jars of water and plant matter and metal and fibre, sealed them, and left them in the sun. The calm, focused thrill I got from this reminded me of making magic potions in the garden as a child, mixing up mud and leaves and truly believing that something amazing will result. When I unscrewed the lid after a few days or weeks, the threads had turned orange, pink, green, yellow, grey; the magic had worked.

‘Modern industry saves us endless labour and drudgery,’ writes Albers in the essay quoted above, ‘but, Janus-faced, it also bars us from taking part in the forming of material and leaves idle our sense of touch and with it those formative faculties that are stimulated by it.’ [3] In a return to the forming of material, the process of natural dyeing calls for patience, attention and slowness. Describing her own natural dyeing process, local artist and Yindjibarndi woman Katie West writes:

Through these repetitive actions I become absorbed in the meditative qualities of the tasks, the environment and seasonal changes. A state of flow follows where all senses become engaged. Knowledge of plants and place is gained through moments to watch, smell, touch, and listen. [4]

West’s work is grounded in her heritage as an Indigenous Australian and a descendant of Stolen Generations. Above all West’s practice puts forth paying attention—becoming engaged with all senses—as a means of connecting deeply to place. Her spoken scores bring together field recordings with observation and small ritual, and her dyed textile works gently gather and hold elements of the natural world.

As a white person in Australia, born overseas, my relationship with land is both tentative and inextricably linked to the ongoing violence of colonisation. Through engaging more closely with my immediate environment—learning to understand its movements, changes and needs—I have begun to develop a deeper connection, respect and sense of responsibility to the places I inhabit. These processes of care and attention have helped me to understand more tangibly the Indigenous ideas of reciprocity between humans and the ‘more-than-human’ world, and also my social and ethical responsibility to learn about and acknowledge the histories that have occurred on these lands where I live and work, the unceded Country of Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung peoples from the Kulin Nation.

In the 2013 book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, scientist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer powerfully and poetically brings together Western scientific thought, Indigenous botanical knowledge, and Kimmerer’s own perspective as a plant scientist whose ancestry lies with the Potawatomi Nation. The author describes her book as ‘a braid woven from three strands’ [5], intertwining these ideas like lengths of sacred sweetgrass to form a prayer for new ways of living and being.

Kimmerer’s writing is woven with gentleness and poetry, an invitation to engage in the ideas she puts forth. Her writing about the nature of ceremony demonstrates the difference between Western colonial ceremonies and those rooted in place:

Many indigenous traditions still recognize the place of ceremony and often focus their celebrations on other species and events in the cycle of the seasons. In a colonist society the ceremonies that endure are not about land; they're about family and culture, values that are transportable from the old country. Ceremonies for the land no doubt existed there, but it seems they did not survive emigration in any substantial way. I think there is wisdom in regenerating them here, as a means to form bonds with this land. [6]

Kimmerer advocates for ceremonies that are ‘reciprocal co-creations, organic in nature, in which the community creates ceremony and the ceremony creates communities.’ She emphasises that these ceremonies should have ‘an active, reciprocal relationship with the more-than-human world.’ [7] In my project, the processes of dyeing enact just such a reciprocal ceremony. I gather plant material to use for dyes, making sure not to take too much and to return the scraps to the compost heap. And in return, I spend time noticing, weeding and planting, learning to better care for the earth.

Contemporary philosopher and mechanic Matthew Crawford suggests that, when engaging with a hands-on craft, the inherent material parameters and step-by-step processes coalesce into what Crawford calls ‘ecologies of attention’—environments, he asserts, that offer a tangible space for our attention to be focused and for embodied perception to flourish. [8] Engaging with a particular ‘ecology’—for example, that of weaving, or cooking, or building a bike—teaches a range of new things to observe, an expansion of understanding that extends to the wider world. In this way, through the rituals of working with natural dyes, my understanding of ‘paying attention’ shifts. This is a different kind of attention from the ‘anti-concentration’ of a craft practice, the single-minded trancelike focus of repetition. This is more like an awakening to the connections and possibilities of the world around me.

I begin to notice the things I eat, the plants that grow on verges and parks and hedgerows in my neighbourhood, the different types of leaves on the eucalypts growing along Merri Creek. I register their changing tones, the budding and withering of flowers from day to day, month to month. I am opened up to a whole new arena of knowledge, things that my European ancestors, and the ancestors of others who lived in this place, might have known as a matter of course: the difference between cellulose and protein fibres, for example, and what a rose-hip is, and when you might expect to find one on a rose-bush, and when the wattles bloom; and what the different processes are for different fibres to turn into thread. Even the most apparently irritating and noxious weeds have hidden qualities—the common stinging nettle, for example, has iron-rich edible leaves; it can produce a green dye; its growth enriches the soil; and the bast fibres in its stem can be scraped and spun into a thread of surprising strength and softness.

Through weaving these threads into new surfaces I extend my practice into holding memories of place, condensed into a feather-light object the size of my palm. While the weaving process is much the same as in my work Soft Hold, these new works, titled New prayers for old feelings, are enriched by the delicacy, precariousness and chance of natural dye colours.

[1] Jenny Holzer, All things are delicately interconnected, wooden postcard with text from Truisms series 1977-1979 (New York: Printed Matter, 2018).

[2] Anni Albers, “Tactile Sensibility,” in On Weaving (Mineola: Dover, 2003), 62.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Katie West, “Living Well,” Artlink Magazine, accessed March 9, 2019, https://www.artlink.com.au/articles/4685/katie-west-living-well/.

[5] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013), [x].

[6] Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 250.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Matthew B. Crawford, The World Outside Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (New York: Farrars, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 23-24.