The Ancestor Gallery
30cm x 30cm x 4 cm (5)
26cm x 26cm x 4cm (2)
20cm x 20cm x 4cm (3)
Description
Lace collars on various fabrics
Themes, comments & storylines
In museums and galleries, in the oil paintings portraying the people of the past, in ancestor galleries of stately homes, textiles abound. Intricate lace collars often surround the faces of the sitters. In this ancestor gallery, there are no faces, the focus is on the fabrics that frame them. The ancestor gallery celebrates the skills and application of those who created such fineries embroiderers, needlewomen, seamstresses and lacemakers. Some were forced by circumstances to undertake such work and often suffered severe hardship as so movingly described in the Song of the Shirt, others, able to choose freely, found great pleasure in their needlework. But whether done by distressed needlewomen or ladies of leisure, textile work has often been trivialized, even by those who should know better, regarded not as admirable and highly skillful art but mere woman's work.
"Se dignifica el trabajo de las mujeres. Su labor callada y constante, considerada sólo como simple entretenimiento, sin la más mínima importancia. Algo en lo que no estoy de acuerdo, pues a través de ellas hay una expresión importante, en el escaso margen artístico al que había acceso. Era modo de supervivencia que pasaba desapercibido, como si habláramos de trabajo menor. Imagino que si el hombre hiciera labores hubiera sido diferente, habría sido valorado como algo muy importante…pero, ya sabemos que el trabajo de casa, las costuras, labores, punto, no ha interesado darle valor alguno, como si no existieran, como si fuera “no hacer nada”. Las labores te llevan a la introspección, a vivir una constancia que centra el pensamiento, te madura."
Carmen Alvarez Mata, April 2010
"I remember one particularly poignant experience of visiting a china-painter's house and seeing, as Virginia Woolf once said, that the very bricks were permeated with her creative energy. All the chairs had needlepoint cushions; all the beds were covered with quilts; all the pillow cases were hand embroidered; all the walls were covered in oil paintings; all the plates were painted with flowers; and the garden was planted with the kind of flowers that were painted on the plates. This woman had done all that work, trying as best she could to fit her creative drive - which could probably have expanded into mural-size paintings or monumental sculptures - into the confined space of her house, which could hardly have held another piece of work." (Chicago 1980:11) Chicago’s narrative is one of “women’s domesticated and trivialized circumstances”, based on what she describes as the "excruciating experience to watch enormously gifted women squander their creative talents” (ibid). This, it could be argued, betrays a dismissive attitude towards such creative enterprises that aim for personal pleasure rather than public appraisal and by implication labels them as wasted, disregarding that not every woman who does textile work, necessarily wants to be a fine artist, as defined by conventional art discourse.
Chicago, Judy (1980), Embroidering our Heritage: The Dinner Party Needlework, Anchor Press New York
Constance Classen (2005:237) in her essay on the alternative aesthetics of women’s craftwork, advocates a re-evaluation of the “traditional realms of feminine creativity”, not by employing “criteria derived from the visual art tradition that marginalized women’s work in the first place”, but “within their own cultural context and on their own aesthetic terms” which emphasized “qualities of intricacy, intimacy, tactility and communality.”
The 18th and 19th century women whose work Classen examines, were not, she suggests “forced by gender conventions to spend their time in useless fancywork”, but due to independent means or family support able to make choices; they chose, by their own testament, needlework and mosaics, where they might just as well have opted for painting, for their own enjoyment and fulfilment. Such work rather than undertaken to conform with male expectations, was more likely to confound them. Indeed, “one wonders,” Classen (2005:232) speculates, “whether occasionally a paterfamilias, startled to find his home transformed into a workplace and showcase of feminine handicrafts, might not have wished that his womenfolk had instead chosen to spend their time unobtrusively writing poetry or studying Greek.”
“The by-now hoary question of why there have not been more women artists in Western history,” she suggests, “perhaps merits a different answer than the usual ones of feminine incapacity or subordination. The women artists were there. We have just not been looking in the right place.”
Classen, Constance (2005), Feminine Tactics: Crafting an Alternative Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, in Classen, Constance (ed), The Book of Touch, Berg, Oxford, New York 2005, pp 228 - 239
“What does he care about Miss Faith Cartwright and her endless and infernal needlework? Every letter his mother sends him contains news of yet more knitting, stitching and tedious crocheting. The Cartwright household must by this time be covered all over - every table, chair, lamp and piano - with acres of tassel and fringe, a woolwork flower heavily abloom in every nook of it. Does his mother really believe that he can be charmed by such a vision of himself - married to Faith Cartwright and imprisoned in an armchair by the fire, frozen in a kind of paralysed stupor, with his dear wife winding him up gradually in coloured silk threads like a cocoon, or like a fly snarled in the web of a spider?” (Atwood 1997:340)
Atwood, Margaret (1999), Alias Grace, Virago, London