Liturgy Of Fabric

Horses doing headstands …

We leave that instant to decay — its own thinking —- as they say of images shared through encrypted messages, a velocity of decay and return that suits the time of France after its Olympics and the UK post Brexit, both nations in concerned by  the return of ‘origin’ myths in culture and politics.

We fast forward to a blizzard of articles in the press  announcing the agreement to exhibit the work in the UK.  Academics jolted into the present and letting rip on issues such the number of penises present or erected in margins and central panels.  Culture is what happens between communities, ways of speaking and acting: undeclared codes of belonging such as the cut of a beard or the interpretation of art. In an attention economy the reader is invited to move down or up a list. We can adopt a running stitch looping across diverse cultures, a leap of faith; a thread caught and made visible like a spiders silk in the summer sun: an unwrapping of the multiplicity in a web of connections and resistance.

What is the most gentle resistance or soft power that can be a foreword to history? After so many atrocities what remains of a shared or global understanding of culture as somehow stitched together in grief and silence, could the tapestry of Bayeux be such a text? 

How could such silence breed so many gentle hours of colouring, threading and stitching of narratives which even in extremes of chaos and violence can raise a smile; how can horses doing headstands and men whose heads are detached from their bodies elicit sympathies and solicit us to consider this battle and coronation prologue as also a pretext, or excuse even for women to be together? 

In a general multiply of hands and eyes to own the moment however finite; and in owing it —— disrupt the control of power, which also defers to war by any means to achieve its ends —- which are always also —-its own destruction; according to Michel Foucault, who is also possibly riding and farting in foldings of this ancient work of ludic escape. 

It is in their escape that the velocity of arrows and horses would signify the end of the Viking epoch; of axe and shield and announce the turning of the world towards new domains of antagonism and land grabs; Holy Wars and the deterritorialisation of tribal systems under ideologies of a single homogenising witness or truth. This relic then is a border work that draws in the world; in its woad, indigo and madder red. 

Under the signs of the astrological and the almighty, fatalism of monarchy ordained by God himself via Rome, this text comes to displace the rural and marginal excellence of the Abbeys of Anglo Saxon Britain with their scroll and knot works; those dark age retellings of the gospel. The tapestry unfolds a linear treatise on how to fix history in the image of its authors. But there is the catch, the thread that sticks and breaks, too taught in its presumptive power and not thinking through the issue of the medium. 

There was no Marshall McLuhan to warn Bishop Odo ...

 There was no Marshall McLuhan to warn Bishop Odo that somebody would have to code the work. It is a neoliberal dilemma, CEOs, President’s and various arbiters of power —- will not —- because they cannot —- do the coding or stitching together of a real material moment ; a point in time that can be interacted with, commented upon and conserved using reversible protocols. In the making an aesthetic emerges not as a synthesis in the sense of an artificial rendering of a tank in the Bayeux Tapestry using a freemium version of an AI application (which will not render sexual images unless a subscription is paid) but rather in the slower subconscious pulling of shapes in abstract lines, the close lines and stitches of the embroiderer and the tight lines of intuitive code

In this slippage of code many have seen their own histories

It is into this time between coding and becoming that we would want to be with others; those from around the world who have found in the hands and faces of the subjects of Bayeux some slippery signalling of oppressed people and in this slippage of code hallucinated their own histories and new versions of our history. 

The South African Women’s Project’s; ‘The Keiskamma Tapestry' started in 2004 for example found the 1000 year old testimony resonates with the struggles for justice of Black women under Apartheid and the ongoing struggles of people at the margins of a new South Africa. This work is on permanent display where politicians can see it daily and it holds them to account— to deliver the promise of a better life that honours the dead who have paved the way.  It is on loan from Standard Bank Corporate Art Collection, South Africa. 

Did these embroiders theorise as they stitched and placed a ritualistic energy in their work?  Is it ritual and theory which haunts and connects them to that scene almost a millennia ago? In the smoke and failing light those Kentish women worked on the tapestry in the aftermath of 1066 and all that blood and spoiled flesh, marked and humiliated bodies, oppressed to the point of disappearance, dehumanised for speaking the wrong language and erased or so it seemed in the formation of the figures before them. 

Did these embroiders theorise as they stitched and placed vitality in their work? Is it imagination which haunts and connects them to that scene in Hastings almost a millennia ago? In smoke and failing light those Kentish women worked on the embroidery in the aftermath of 1066 and all that blood and spoiled flesh, marked and humiliated bodies, oppressed to the point of disappearance, dehumanised for speaking the wrong language and erased or so it seemed in the formation of the figures before them.ideas are stitched like threads and needles.

It seems that women saw embroidery as a way of reclaiming history, taking the grand, violent battlefield scenes and transforming them into patterns and fantasy. How can this be possible without it also being a betrayal of the dead? It is necessary to treat their inheritance as one would a serious and fatal injury.

History can always take a more ferocious and brutal turn as images are relayed on FaceBook or Telegram 

The Palestinian History Tapestry has traveled across the world to share its regional stitches and style with international audiences. In Edinburgh in 2021 it was exhibited and celebrated with little sense of how history can always take a more ten on the bodies of the losers and the dead. 

Of course Michel Foucault did not really say that but instead something about petrol bombs but we are beyond that style of resistance or slavery to the origin of a sentiment or theory. We are instead together and sticking to our collective thread of remembrance and turning back, to Ariadne and all those Greek myths that Martin Heidegger supposed would grow back over the Third Reich and make Europe great again. We are here not for ethnic show trials but ethical show how’s ... how to break out of the labyrinth.

The powers of our Sun and a changing atmosphere, draining it of colour

We turn lastly in this brief forward step to the work of Canadian artist Sandra M. Sawatzky, this is an individual work The Black Gold Tapestry but tells a collective story of fossil fuels. It was an epic and obsessive work of hours and hours of stitching week in and week out to achieve. In those hours we like to imagine the artist was also in some invisible dialogue with sisters around the world who were also concerned about the climate crisis and the stitches required to pull the earth out of its catastrophic turn. 

The artist has calculated a sixth of a life spent on the task, we do not know how long it took to make the Bayeux Tapestry but we do know that for almost a thousand years those stitches have held our attention and inspired lapses of reason and irresponsible speculation. 

A tender time that attracts others to relax and reflect on the transformation of natural dyes over time and the slow exposure of the tapestry that might eventually drain it of all colour; a victim of the powers of our Sun made more intense through global warming. An artwork that then would be best read with the fingertips as a tactile surface, camouflaged to the eyes of history.