All Writing

Aug 30, 2019 | Exhibitions, Fibre & Textile, Making Community

We’re taking on capitalist forces, one stitch at a time

Carlyn Yandle · on Substack

Back when I was still transitioning from workaday newspaper editor to mainly work-for-free artist I applied for a Nexus card.
“Whaddaya you do for a living?” asks the clerk in her American drawl, without looking at me.
When I get this question I always wish there was an easy answer, some simple keystroke like in the relationship status options on Facebook.

“It’s complicated,” I say. She sighs.

I start in about how I was a journalist but then quit to go into full-time Fine Arts studies, then after graduation I got a studio and am now developing an art practice and doing work for upcoming projects… and stop as her eyes fall to half-mast. We go back and forth for a while like this when she announces: “I’m gonna put you down as housewife.”
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Even though I’ve always been self-supporting I decide not to waste my breath defending my non-conforming life choices. But really, I’m using the best skills I have to be a contributing member of society and I’m grateful to be a part of the ever-expanding, borderless community of crafters, craftivists and visual artists, all connected beyond language by hand-making for peace of mind and social, political connection.

Craft creates wellness, it brings humanity during turbulent times, it breaks down hierarchies and is the connecting thread between those who make for personal, tactile pleasure or for use and those who make art for art’s sake. Craft is as at home in the home as it is on Etsy or in the white-cube gallery. It has footholds in ancient practices and the avant-garde. It complicates categorization and won’t be fenced in (or out).
One of my pieces is currently at home among the works of 20 spinners, weavers, felters, quilters, garment designers, knitters, rug-hookers and others in a current Gulf Island fibre-arts show. Some of those sharing their work self-identify as artists and some as specific kind of makers but all of our pieces hang together in conversation, sparking more conversation and more ideas among visitors.

This exhibition is another reminder that craft is embedded in deeply-personal making activity, the tactility of the culturally-rich materials and the creative communities we live in.
Making and their makers form an essential humanizing force more encompassing and enduring than even advanced capitalism but there’s no way to show that value on a Nexus form.
I reject that line of questioning. And I am not married to a house.