SUSAN BRIGHT

Rozsika Parker’s pioneering text The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine, first published in 1984 and following with an exhibition in 1988 was a pivotal exploration of the role of embroidery in Western culture. Parker explores how it became a feminine construct and how artists of the 1970s and 1980s used it as a strategy for subversion or political intent within their art marking. It did much to reassess the use of thread as a serious material in art, as can be seen by the critical interest and institutional support of the later work by Louise Bourgeois and the market value of Tracey Emin’s works in the 1990s.

 The object I have chosen is not embroidered (although the artist does also include embroidery in her practice) it is crocheted—perhaps the most dexterous of handmade skills that have come to be known as the “domestic crafts.” What we are looking at is a giant sculptural doily with images created within it copied from her family photo album. These are generic scenes common to the snapshot—a mother and baby, the first day of school and siblings playing in the playground. They are instantly recognizable through their repetition in any family photographic narrative. The doily is large; it takes up space in the gallery—unlike a domestic doily, which is the most frivolous, decorative and fussy of objects, there purely to protect a table from an ornament, or placed daintily on a plate under cake. This doily however, has presence, power, weaving together the family unit and transforming a domestic object into something that questions the personal and the universal, ornamentation, as well as the pretty.

 Caroline McQuarrie is an artist from New Zealand, living and working in Wellington. Combining domestic pictures with domestic craft and elevating both of those to the status of art, her work possesses both breathtaking technical skills that weaken with every new generation and contemporary desires to question the role and function of photography. There is heart in the latter, something I feel is often lacking in much of contemporary photography. Her interest in the photographic object is one that is motivated by how photographs maintain connections between people, rather than more ontological investigations or theoretical concerns of image making per se.

 This piece takes its title from a song by Bright Eyes (a folky/ indie band) and also has autobiographical references. She states, “In my family, the act of making was another method we used to keep each other close. Birthday and Christmas presents are often hand made, as children we were encouraged to use our spare time to create – sewing, pottery, painting and crafts of all kinds were encouraged and engaged in throughout my childhood. In my memories the act of making resonates strongly with connections to people.” This is key to the piece and the thread weaves the people together in a beautiful web of connectedness (or entrapment, depending on your view). Family connections are not always easy, connotations of victim or prey never far from a web. These common narratives are brought to the surface and laid on the floor. This placement together with the combination of crochet, family snapshots, and a decorative domestic item make for a heady investigation into structural categories and hierarchies that reinvigorate old debates around art and craft, public and private, decoration and ornamentation, and sculpture and photography. How refreshing to feel all these things are looked at anew in an object like a doily, through a material as humble and as vulnerable as thread, and with the skills of a woman and her hook.