Anna Dunnill

SOFT HOLD

2018-19

HOLD IT IN YOUR HANDS (THE PORTABLE WORLD)

PART 2
Excerpted from the written component of my thesis for Master of Fine Art (Visual Art), 2019. Read Part 1 here.

THE MINIATURE

After completing Pocket devotional, my use of the miniature continued with Soft Hold, 2018-19, which saw a shift to weaving as the primary mode of making. These initial weavings were constructed on a very small tapestry loom—roughly 15 x 15 cm—that I made from mat board and masking tape; and were made using single strands of cotton for both warp and weft. I learned to weave in 2016 at the Australian Tapestry Workshop, adhering to the high professional standards employed there both in terms of materials (specialist warp thread and high-quality wool weft to ensure longevity) and technique (ensuring an even, consistent surface and straight sides). For these small-scale weavings, however, I shrank my materials down to a single strand of cotton for both warp and weft, and freed myself from the requirement to produce a perfectly straight rectangle, focusing instead on manipulating the material into what Anni Albers calls a ‘pliable plane’. [1]

In an essay that aligns the allure of the miniature with the desire for control, Australian poet and essayist Fiona Wright suggests: ‘Perhaps what miniature objects offer us, most overtly and entirely, are borders.’ [2] Many of the pieces in my series Soft Hold echo the size of a smartphone screen. But unlike the limitless unfolding of the smartphone—with its infinite scroll and rhizomatic network of links, apps and updates—these surfaces are contained. The only way to experience more of them is by looking more closely, or perhaps by touching them. ‘In looking at a miniature,’ says Bachelard, ‘unflagging attention is required to integrate all the detail.’ [3]

As a response to anxiety, then, the miniature object makes sense: it provides a discrete space to inhabit. As a portal to access prayer or a sense of the divine, it condenses the vast and unknowable into a small, manageable, haptic space.

PORTABLE PRACTICE

In a fragmented world, a transitional object provides a sense of continuity. In a similar way, a portable art practice can synthesise fractured moments of time and place into a temporal whole through the creation of surface. Textile processes, repetitive and portable, are ideally suited to a practice that responds to fragmentation and lack of connection with a particular place.

Pocket devotional and Soft Hold were both produced outside of the ‘studio,’ if the studio is defined as a specific site dedicated to art-making. The only condition required to produce these works is a decent light and the ability to sit down. Spare threads and sewing snips can be held in the lap; the work itself is held in the hand. It can be packed away quickly—slipped into a bag—and taken up again at the next opportunity.

The Soft Hold series was made on a postcard-sized loom, cut from a scrap of mounting board, which fits precisely, perfectly, into a slim paper bag that once held thread. This in turn slips into a drawstring calico bag along with a zipped purse of silk and cotton threads, scissors, a couple of needles. My studio fits in a handbag.

The portability of this work echoes some of the key elements that define the types of labor traditionally practiced by women, as identified by anthropologist Judith K. Brown: in particular, tasks that are repetitive and don't require ‘rapt concentration’, are not dangerous, don't require being far from home, and can be put down and picked up easily when interrupted. Historically, this has been dictated by women’s obligations in child-rearing, which is not conducive either to long stretches of uninterrupted attention in a secluded place or to chasing wild game across unpredictable terrain: as such, in subsistence economies, womens’ contributions aside from child rearing frequently included the various elements of cloth production such as fibre preparation, spinning and weaving. [4] Spinning, in particular, took up enormous swathes of time prior to mechanisation, and so women often carried their spindles with them and worked throughout the day. Prehistoric textiles expert Elizabeth Wayland Barber cites examples of village women in Greece who as late as the 1930s were spinning wool on drop spindles, requiring them to spin near-constantly, including while riding between villages. [5]

For Chicago-based textile artist Karolina Gnatowski (kg), portable practice is a response to a certain sense of domestic instability. After moving to the USA from Poland in the 1980s, kg’s extended family lived in a cramped home with very little personal space. As a small child with no designated play area, kg was given a brown paper grocery bag in which to keep their craft supplies—a revelatory moment that provided them with, as they describe it, their ‘first studio’. ‘This framed the way I thought about studios and occupying space,’ kg says. ‘I realised you [could] make art anywhere if you packed it right.’ [6]

Textiles, if you pack them right, are ideal for travel. They’re clean, they fold down small; they don’t break or require power outlets. The simplicity of ancient textile techniques is also their strength. While they graduated from paper bags to plastic tubs and eventually dedicated rooms, kg’s work is still informed by the need or desire for portability; they have described Chicago's Blue Line train as their most productive working space. [7] (Perhaps not coincidentally, the train is a mode of transport that mimics the movement of weaving, travelling back and forth across the city, across the loom.) I met kg in June 2019, while visiting the USA as part of my studio research. In their Chicago studio, kg showed me a set of custom-made hand looms, the largest perhaps A4, that fit inside one another like nesting dolls: a complete set of equipment ready to be packed into a tote bag. Their weavings explore complex and tangled narratives of self, with objects that contain embedded personal histories enmeshed in (or becoming) warp and weft—cigarette butts, flowers, guitar plectrums, shirt collars. Disparate ideas of identity are combined across fragments of time, through weavings carried on the body, synthesised into a single plane.

In my project, the production of Pocket devotional and Soft Hold in transit conveys a sense of movement, but not a moving forward. It is more like travelling from one end of a train line to the other, and back again, moving along and around a small place of quiet stillness. This is how weaving becomes praying. Slowly building, one thread at a time, a ‘pliable plane’: a small still space that can fold you up in its quiet surface, and ultimately bring you back to the world.

[1] Anni Albers, “Weaving, Hand,” in On Weaving (London: Studio Vista, 1963), 19.

[2] Fiona Wright, “In Miniature,” Meanjin, May 31, 2015, https://meanjin.com.au/essays/in-miniature/.

[3] Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 159.

[4] Judith K. Brown, “A Note on the Division of Labor by Sex,” American Anthropologist 72, no. 5 (October 1970): 1073–78, doi: 10.1525/aa.1970.72.5.02a00070.

[5] Elizabeth Wayland Barber, Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years (New York, London: Norton, 1994), 31.

[6] Julie Rodrigues Widholm, Karolina Gnatowski: Some Kind of Duty (Chicago: DePaul Art Museum, 2019), 20.

[7] Ibid.