TRAWLERS (Gallery text)

My work deals with textile-built structures and knitting techniques manuals. From these two, I make sculptures in which I emphasize the handmade and there-dimensional character of fabric, challenging its gravity with the substitution of the soft structure of threads and weaves.

I have a special interest in a type of sample pieces from the textile world called samplers. Samplers are fragments of cloth in which women showed their needlework skills. They are textile pieces that worked as examples of patterns for women to repeat and gain expertise in the practice of stitching and diverse embroidery techniques. The practice of creating samplers is linked to the act of showing one’s skills in needlework techniques and also to expressing ideas and showing style preferences. Samplers worked as an individual encyclopedia of one’s own abilities, being these examples of moderation, patience, dedication and virtuosity as well. Each textile language has its own rules, grammars, and steps to follow to achieve the mastery of such language. Languages are techniques, some of them fallen into disuse, others recovered, some alive, all of them combined producing a sampler. The sculptures I make can be seen as three-dimensional samplers in which I also leave flaws and personal habits in the use of techniques unhidden. I follow the rules in diverse manuals, but I get to different shapes. They are samples of possibilities; they are fragments of materialities that coexist anarchically and refer to systems of handmade textile production.

I extract structures from sculptures of weave schemes I find in knitting manuals. Needlework for ladies for pleasure and profit is the name of a knitting manual by Dorinda, published in England in 1886. This manual is part of the Victorian Knitting Manuals collection of the University of Southampton. This kind of manuals became very popular in Europe toward the end of the 19th century, and they worked as a way to guarantee the circulation of textile techniques to make clothes or appliques, remarking the profitable character that these practices could represent for women. Drawn by those kinds of publications, I found DMC’s Encyclopedia of Needlework by Therese De Dillmont, also published in 1886, and translated into more than 17 languages. I thus plunged into an endless amount of knitting manuals to do research on still in force techniques as well as on those long gone, which have been developed by millions of women investing their life in these practices. The techniques applied to these sculptures go from crochet, felting, trimming, embroidery, lace, tricot, loom, fabric dyed with natural dyes, and sewing. The sculptures’ morphology responds to step by step motifs schemes of the techniques in these manuals. In this way, I seek to escalate the motifs creating aerial scallops where different textile logics, temporalities, and materialities can be identified, all of which seek to challenge their lightness, weight, and hanging, highlighting as well the historical importance of these practices.

Alejandra Mizrahi