From Fibre to Decorated Textiles in the Early North Atlantic: Weaving Identities Across Cultures
Organizers
Alexandra Makin, Mary Valante
session information
Seminars
What can studying dress and fibres from the early North Atlantic tell us about identities across the region? Fibre working was necessary for everyday survival, and often entailed the skilled production of attractive and decorative materials that were a vital part of the early medieval economy. Different technologies, fashions, and decoration were popular in specific regions, which indicated local preferences, encouraged creativity, and added value for trade. We hope to gather an interdisciplinary group of researchers, teachers, curators, and artists to spark a dialogue about any, but not limited to, the following:
How did people’s clothing reflect their cultural background, where they lived, how they wish to be perceived, etc?
How were skills taught and passed down?
What can differences in technologies, choices made by craft-workers, and adaptations to local environments (available materials, dressing for a local climate, etc), tell us about movements of peoples?
When were skills, styles and decorative arts shared and imitated, imported, and exported, and why?
How did social hierarchies and gendered expectations impact fibre workers, who weregiven access to higher level skills, and who oversaw workers?
What sorts of spaces existed for textile manufacture in rural vs urban areas?
In what ways was domestic production like and unlike production for scale?
We envision linked seminars, workshops, and a lab, including meetings, in a modified roundtable format, culminating in a final large discussion that brings together the insights of making through practice and how this might influence interpretation.
Lab
The lab session will be a place for participants to explore experimental and experiential research and learning. It will focus on a single textile tool, the pin beater. We will discuss designing experimental research, and where, applicable, the importance of IRB (InstitutionalReview Board) approvals for involving human test subjects. Participants will consider how to translate experimental research into experiential learning in classroom and similar settings. We will weave and test out different possible uses for pin beaters, using simple lap looms and 3D printed replicas of different styles of pine beaters, thanks to National Museums of Scotland. We will test different experimental methodologies while engaging in the practice of experiential learning.
Workshops
Fibre and textile workers in the early North Atlantic were skilled in many different areas. We are proposing a skills bootcamp, with practitioners and artists and scholars interacting to learn techniques and from one another. Practitioners and artists may be knowledgeable about processes including, but not limited to:
Preparation: tanning, retting, degreasing
Twining and knotting: cord and rope-making, net making, sprang weaving
Spinning
Weaving: tabbies, twills, basket weaving, tapestry weaving, card weaving
Needlework: sewing, embroidery, nalbinding
Dyeing: mordanting, dye preparation, dye baths
Studying and practicing these techniques will help us all understand and be able to discuss issues with the ways these skills are too often presented in scholarly literature, including“unskilled” labour and “craftwork” vs art.
Contact information
Please get in touch with the organizers, Alexandra Makin, alexandra.makin@outlook.com, and Mary Valante, valantema@appstate.edu.