The installation For the Seventh Brother is a collection of sculptural objects and sound works informed by my personal history with faith, and my desire to be and do good. What it actually means to be and do good is a question I have been trying to unweave for myself, and reckoning with that question is the heart of this work.
The objects are sourced from family heirlooms, from my own living space and practices of belief, and from tools I have used as a weaver. There are sculptures made of pewter and wax, recreations of precious fabric woven by myself and of pivotal objects. Pieces through the space create rhymes with each other, and the sound works play over them in focussed areas, shifting them with their tonal qualities. Each element of the installation is a thread in the fabric of the overall work, and each idea I introduce in this writing is a thread in the fabric of the paper.
I have a memory I return to when I try to imagine heaven, of my childhood church, All Saints—of an opening to the sky and the air.
One day, out of the blue, the caretaker of the church opened up the courtyard to sweep and clear it—the very decidedly locked courtyard that I had longed to step into every week. A glimpse of brightness in the dark red velvet mahogany church. I had to muster up all my little girl courage and ask him if I could step inside, because it was so decidedly locked and I had never before seen anyone inside. Only stone and a small bird bath and sky, sky, sky. He said ok. And it was like nothing else. Spinning in wide space in the courtyard of the church.
I have struggled to communicate what it felt like to finally step foot into that courtyard, into the beam of light at the center of it all, just me and the birdbath and the wide open sky above me.
That’s why I have to show it in other ways. The impulse to render, to manifest these experiences in material form, abstract them and represent them in space, allows me to describe moments of transcendence in ways language cannot. Glenn Adamson[1] says that craft is “a discipline of the hands,” that it can be hard to talk about, that you have to do it.[2] God is that way too, at least I think so.
[1]. Craft theorist, curator, and author of Thinking Through Craft.
[2] Adamson, Thinking Through Craft (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021), 3. There are a lot of different ways to be considered good (“morally right or based on religious principles”;[1] “having in a large or adequate degree the qualities or properties desirable of a thing (material or immaterial)”;[2] “to help, benefit, or do service to a person”[3]) in this world. People have a lot to say about it, and I guess so do I.[4]
[1]. Cambridge Dictionary, s.v. “good.”
[2]. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “good.”
[3]. Oxford English Dictionary.
[4]. When I talk about good I realize my definition is specific to my experience. My references for what good means to me come from Christianity, certainly; from my family in very large part, and not just my religious family. There is a cultural understanding that permeates throughout. Overarchingly, the feeling of goodness as it has been expressed to me is a choice to negate one’s own desires and wishes in service of others. I am sure most people have an idea of what good means separated from a person, and what good means as applied to a person and their actions/ways of being. I do not mean to talk about notions of goodness and what it means to be good in a casual way, in a way that can be applied to a piece of cake. There are ideas about moral righteousness in Christianity and without (though we could argue that those ideas about moral righteousness in secular Western society are still heavily influenced by Christian doctrines and ideas) that affect my behaviour as a woman, as a daughter and granddaughter, which are in large part the subject of my thesis work.
C.S. Lewis explains that the word cardinal comes from the Latin for hinge of a door.[1] The Cardinal virtues are Prudence, Temperance, Justice, and Fortitude.
[1]. C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (William Collins, 2017), 76.
I’ve been thinking about how things hang and move on a fixed point.
When I was a young girl in Catholic school, I started to turn away from Christianity. I was interested in the fields behind my house, in finding other names for the divine. I learned about tarot and got scolded (you know that’s witchcraft right?) for bringing my deck to school to give other girls readings. Now tarot is a way for me to ground myself, to consider the past, present, and future, and my role within them.
The tarot deck has two cards within the major Arcana called Temperance and Justice. In tarot, Temperance means balance, moderation, patience purpose.[1] Justice means fairness, truth, cause and effect.[2] Sometimes in a reading cards appear reversed, and their meanings change. The deck has something to tell you that is specific to reversal: not just a meaning, but a meaning flipped on its head. In reverse a card can mean both, and opposite, at the same time. Lately, I’ve been trying to be more like The Fool.[3]
[1]. Liz Dean, The Ultimate Guide to Tarot (Fair Winds Press, 2019), 32.
[2]. Dean, 47.
[3]. The Fool is a card in the Major Arcana of a traditional tarot deck. The imagery shows a jester-like figure standing on the edge of a cliff, looking blissfully up at the sky with one leg raised, ready to step off the cliff unknowingly. The card calls on you to act without knowing exactly where you’re going, make decisions, try new things, step into the unknown without fear, with a certain naïve belief that everything will work out for you.
I have two door hinges called Prudence and Fortitude. They come from the doors of a heavy mahogany armoire, a family heirloom passed to me from my maternal grandfather, an Anglican priest who also loved C.S. Lewis.
Lewis says “Prudence is practical common sense. He says the proper motto is not “Be good, sweet maid, and let who can be clever,” but “Be good, sweet maid, and don’t forget that this involves being as clever as you can.” God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than of any other slackers.”[1] He says “Fortitude includes two kinds of courage: the kind that faces danger as well as the kind that sticks it under pain.”[2]
[1]. Lewis, 77-78
[2]. Lewis, 78.
The armoire sat with me when I was a child in my grandparents’ large house, in their kitchen. Full to the brim with cutlery, fine porcelain, placemats and linens. When my mother moved them into a condo, the armoire moved into their storage space in the basement of the building. My grandmother decided then that I should have it when I moved with my then-partner into an apartment in a high rise.
When we went to get it out of the storage room, room and armoire both were packed tight. Even extricating the furniture required deep digging into the room, where we then had to completely empty it of its contents. My grandfather by that time had rapidly advancing dementia. He stood at the door in confusion and worry as we took the armoire away. I was angry with him for being so perplexed by everything.[1]
[1]. I regret this very much.
For months I’d been trying to convince my family that he wasn’t well. He couldn’t keep up with a game of bridge, he’d call me wrong names. It took a long time for anyone to believe me, even as I went over there weekly, helping him change his banking passcodes on a constant loop until he couldn’t remember how to retrieve his email either.
The armoire stood in the dining room of my apartment, filled with all my sewing and weaving supplies, some books, a few plates. Then into storage upon the dissolution of my relationship. It sat in storage for years.
I don’t know if my family understands why I want to use that armoire in my work, how much it represents to me about the burden I feel as a daughter and granddaughter. Keeping secrets and remembering passwords and pulling out decades worth of napkins to move its large skeleton.
When Grandfather was moved into assisted living he lay in his hospital bed, shaking his legs which were too weak to carry him.
Every minute or so he’d turn to me. “I’d better get going now…” he’d say. He’d remind me of the files which had fallen off his bed, so I would mime picking up the pretend files, setting them right on top of his legs to steady him.
“I’d better get going now…”
“Ok, but Grandfather, would you stay a little while longer?”
“Ok, dear.”
The armoire is used in For the Seventh Brother in pieces. I’ve been reckoning with it, taking it apart. Winding the linen I weave with around it, using its hardware and remaking its hinges in wax, making them transparent and strange, useless. I want to disrupt its usefulness, relieve it from service, and relieve myself of its presence.
I have not been weaving. As much as this work is about weaving, it is somehow never about the pleasurable part.
It’s the hard work, not the part of believing in God[1] that is all grand revelations and comfort in dark moments. This work doesn’t seem to be about the part of weaving where you sit on the bench in glorious anticipation, when everything is set up, warp wound,[2] tension handled, threads pulled into correctness through the heddles.[3] A verticality ready to be woven upon.
[1]. In the Anglican sense: the being that created the universe, the world, everything in it.
[2]. You can wind on a warping board—or if you’re lucky, you will have a warping mill to wind on. Mills are lovely. They spin as you wind so you can remain stationary, and the threads move around you. I use a board, a wooden frame with pegs which hangs on a wall. Make a slip knot with your yarn and slide it onto the first peg, then start pulling your yarn over and under the pegs on the board, being mindful of where you need to create a cross in your threads, back and forth zigzagging down the board and back up again, over and under alternating. Every few minutes, stop and count the threads at the bottom of the board, counting how many ends you’ve wound and bundling them off into loose ties if you’ve accrued enough threads to make a whole inch. If you make a mistake here you’ll have to take it all off and redo it or else you won’t be able to transfer the warp to the loom with ease.
[3]. Heddles are loops of wire or cord attached to the loom’s harness that are used to separate and control the warp yarns during the weaving process.
This body of work has turned into an effort to convey the before steps, the readying of things, quiet work which goes unnoticed.[1] So the fabric here isn’t pure and soft and malleable.
[1]. “Making work with textiles is a form of ‘refusal’ and ‘dissent,’ writes the weaver Faith Gillespie in “The Masterless Way: Weaving an Active Resistance,” from the book of collected essays Women and Craft (1987). Gillespie was referring to craftspeople as workers without line managers, creating not to meet market demand but the imperatives of their hearts, ‘making what is wanted and needed at quite another level of human life.’” Elkin, 98
It’s fabric I wove carefully, in a cotton linen blend: a plain tabby structure, simple crisscrosses, hemstitched[1] at either end.
[1]. A way of finishing the edges of a woven work, making sure the fabric won’t unravel when removed from the loom.
I took this fabric that I wove and cared for, and washed it to bring the threads nestled together. I folded it small, dipped it in wax, cast it in pewter. Waxed and molded, turned to metal. The pewter keeps the fabric still, memorializes it—makes it seem more valuable somehow, different. The hinge becomes useless and so does the fabric, but in different ways.
I used pewter for this process of casting because I needed to do it myself. It made sense that it should be a low cost material previously used decoratively, domestically. Creating the moulds of this fabric, and being able to melt the pewter on a hot plate and pour it into the cured silicone in my own studio mattered to me.[1] Using pewter and working with the metal myself was closer in process to the creation of a textile, a soft metal with a low melting point allowed for my own metalworking and removed the need for any outsourcing—any eschewing of the work.
[1]. I have resisted the tendency among artists today to make textile work in mediums other than textile—specifically metal. There has been a recent trend of artists taking seemingly “soft” materials and chose to remake them in seemingly “hard” materials, in order to give them weight and respect in the greater artistic community. This makes me angry. I don’t want to have to use some other material, to transform textile, to force others to respect my work. So I resisted. I resisted this for a long time. I am uncomfortable with the lack of cloth in my thesis installation, and that the cloth has for the most part been transformed into pewter through casting, like swans transforming to boys or vice versa. But even this choice feels like a service. We say often—or at least I hear often, “does this serve the work?” I find it hard to reconcile a cloth-less body, even if it is a body of work, but I also find it hard to break habits, so I will defer to service.
Maybe I’m doing away with function as a protest against work. The hinge turns to wax: now you can’t hang anything off it; virtue no longer virtuous. The fabric folded and stuck can’t come undone, can’t wrap around or protect anything.[1] These objects get to be their own things. Separate and important.[2]
[1]. “Fabrics have wrapped the bodies of the dead, at times becoming a skin for mummies, and over time they have gradually molded themselves to the skin of the living.” Yuko Tanaka, Power of the Weave: The Hidden Meanings of Cloth (International House of Japan, 2013), 57.
[2]. Sara Ahmed speaks about shifted objects in Disorientation and Queer Objects, sayingthat for Marx, when a table becomes a commodity it is endowed with agency and has a life of its own. That the life is “stolen” from those who make the table and from the very form of its matter (the wood). She says the table acquires a life through how it arrives, through what it comes into contact with and the work that it allows us to do. She says maybe the life of the table is borrowed from the wood and from the maker, but that borrowing involves a pledge of return. Ahmed, “Conclusion, Disorientation and Queer Objects” in Queer Phenomenology Orientations, Objects, Others (Duke University Press, Durham, 2006), 164.
There is something about working in a body which is often defined in its not-ness that gets at why I want to allow these objects a chance at being their own thing. Feminine is defined by its lack of masculine. It makes sense for me to be working in a tradition which is also defined by its not-ness, in not being art, in its lack.[1]
[1]. “[Craft] is instead a supplement of the artwork, in the sense in which Jacques Derrida originally proposed that term in Of Grammatology (1977), A supplement is that which provides something necessary to another, “original” entity, but which is nonetheless considered to be extraneous to that original. Derrida describes the supplement as pointing to a “lack”, which might be present in a single work or in an entire field of discourse.” Adamson, Thinking Through Craft, 11.
Bracha Ettinger’s theorization around the matrixial feminine tries to eke out a new definition of feminine, one that is not only defined in its opposition to and failure to be masculine.[1]
[1]. “An essentialised notion of the feminine as a primarily temporal force can be summarized as the becoming force of a ‘could have been otherwise’; not an originary force in the sense of ‘origin’ but a force of a complex ‘here and now’ that coexists along with and gets enriched by past and future durations; hence, an essence of sexual difference that has nothing to do with a binary logic of static and oppositional genders produced by structural impossibilities and transcendent signifiers.” Chrysanthi Nigianni, “The Matrixial Feminine or a Case of Metempsychosis” (in Studies in the Maternal, 1(2)), 4.
Tangled up in this comparison is a parallel—I am working in a form often defined by its service to function and use, inhabiting a gender that is also defined by service. Craft, too, needs a new, perhaps matrixial definition, unless Adamson is to be believed that it is precisely craft’s subordination which is its strength.[1]
[1]. “As dismaying as the overtly sexist, classist, or racist aspects of craft’s inferiority may be, that disheartening story should not blind us to the complexity and usefulness of craft’s limitedness. In fact, as in most cases of asymmetrical power relations, it is precisely through an examination of the terms of its subordination that the social prejudices that attend craft can be redressed.” Adamson, 5.
So if Ettinger’s matrixial definition of the feminine is built upon comparison between feminine and feminine, and the complicated interweaving therein, rather than a phallic model of understanding of feminine as a lack or void space,[1] can a matrixial definition of craft be implemented wherein craft objects are posed towards and in relation to each other, and not to art objects? Art objects are so often defined by their unserviceability, their aesthetic value removed from domestic space and usefulness required of craft.[2]
[1]. Nigianni, “The Matrixial Feminine, or a Case of Metempsychosis,” 2.
[2]. “Craft’s position within the arts is a complicated affair. In some ways, it is analogous to the term ‘color.’ Just as every object must be made in some way, and hence could be considered in some sense to be crafted, every object has color. When one says that an object is colorful, this is not taken to mean that other objects lack color entirely; similarly, when we say that something is highly crafted, we are distinguishing it only in degree, and not in kind, from other things that have been made. There are artworks that are not only colorful, but are in some sense about color-by artists as diverse as Titian, Rubens, Monet, Kandinsky, and Richter. Equally, artworks may not only be well made, but may address the conditions of their own manufacture. And there are other parallels. Like art that seems to be about its own craftsmanship, art about color was at some points in history thought to be inferior. Finally, like color, craft is a word that most people think they understand-a commonsense term. Yet both have been subject to considerable speculation.” Adamson, Thinking Through Craft, 1.
Remaking functional objects in new materials and freeing them[1] from service is a gesture towards a matrixial view of craft. There is friction in For The Seventh Brother, which exists as an installation in a gallery with white walls and a grey floor,[2] taking on these ideas about what craft means in a nexus with itself. Small moments within the installation (repurposing a wooden shelf from a domestic space to house the pewter fabric, for example) reacquaint the objects with the vocabulary of craft within the gallery.
[1] “Yanagi Muneyoshi, too, wrote many books that discuss beauty and the conditions of its creation. In Teshigoto no Nihon (Japan: A Nation of Handicrafts) he writes: ‘The most striking point is the fact that all are made with practical use in mind. Being made for use, they are not there merely to be looked at or enjoyed…Unfortunately, people have always tended to think of things made for practical use as somehow base in nature. I therefore call utilitarian objects ‘art that is unfree,’ because they are constrained by their utility…it is actually we humans who complain of this constraint or lack of freedom. A return to the perspective of nature offers a completely different view. Fitness for use means satisfying the necessities. Being limited by the properties of the materials means surrendering oneself to nature’s bounty.’” Tanaka, The Power of the Weave, 54.
[2]. “Maybe it’s time for those who care about craft to allow it to flourish in a…state of benign neglect. If craft were left to its own devices, perhaps it could happily occupy an unproblematic spot in the pantheon of art concepts. But then we would miss something else that craft has—something that is most clearly (if unintentionally) proven by the marginalization of the institutions that champion it: craft, as a cultural practice, exists in opposition to the modern conception of art itself” Adamson, Thinking Through Craft, 2.
The sound works take two forms. The first, Hmmnal (In the Style of Silence) was recorded in the Trinity College chapel. I recorded myself improvising a tune, and then listened back to that recording in the space as I recorded again, harmonizing with myself as I went, creating a choral piece alone in the chapel, in the style I learned as a child in church choir.
The second, Screwtape, was recorded in my studio, with my tools and in my workspace. You can hear subtle gestures to that fact within the recording: the streetcar going around the bend outside, metal clinking against itself on my loom. Again, the melody was improvised and built up over time in the space, but for Screwtape I heavily edited the recording after the fact, allowing it to transform away from traditional choral style.
I have been working with many different materials. I believe in them all separately and want to give them all the weight they deserve, independent of each other. However, I am enamored with how they live together in space. I sing as I work. I want to be inside my body,[1] not upstairs in my head, in the sky above the church courtyard.
[1]. “Singing is a thoroughly bodily action (Klomp 2011). It is performed by one’s vocal cords and resonates not only through the cranial bone but through the whole body, supported by the midriff… Singing is not dependent on reflexion or on a secondary expression of a thought.” David Plüss, “Singing/ Embodiment/Resonance,” International Handbook of Practical Theology (deGruyter 2022), 535.
For me the repetition, the trance of working, of weaving, is not about ascending away from my physical experience, but instead a trance of further and further grounding into my body. Singing helps me do this. I resurrect my voice[1] when I sing. I steal it back from the priests and witches who might have taken it from me.[2]
[1]. “Singing is an individual expression. The voice is like a fingerprint. We can discern voices easily and identify a well-known person in the dark or without seeing them in a crowd of speaking people. Every person’s voice is composed of their own tone, colour and articulation.” Pluss, 540.
[2]. “As the Roman Catholic liturgist Bonaccorso outlines, a variety of aesthetic and cognitive strands in liturgical actions augment the chances for transcendental experiences. Calvin remarked that “the hearts of all may be roused and stimulated to make similar prayers […] and thank God with a common love” (cf. 2.1.2.). One eighteenth century witness of Reformed four-part singing found himself moved to tears through this very special worship experience (cf. 2.1.2.). Both cases speak of experiences of transcendence and transformation through communal singing. In our times, the ritual use of short phrases of biblical content, as in Taizé, can lead to feelings of oneness. Singing can lead to ecstasy, like in Charismatic worship. Both can be understood as examples of experiences of transcendence, where strands of aesthetic and cognitive acts are interwoven” (Pluss 543).
“While singing, our brain functions within the body, words are pronounced, melodies are brought forth while the sound already reaches our ears, and our bodies receive the sounds, through vibrations. We produce and receive emotions while singing. Our brain functions as an ‘open loop’ in connectivity with the entire body and with the environment. We breathe in and out while singing. Through singing, we can physically experience that we receive faith. We are moved and even altered” (Pluss, 540). Singing as I work helps to reintegrate my body into the ‘open loop’ of my experience, rooting myself in the present rather than aiming for that transcendence Pluss speaks of, but in doing so it helps me to reach a much more spiritual experience than I otherwise could; similar to practices of divination for me. Engaging with tarot is an excuse to sit quietly with myself and consider how the symbols of the cards relate to my inner world—I am not trying to transcend through those symbols but rather to use them to open the loop back up, grounding in feeling and experience of my body rather than the heady space in my mind.
The crownpiece of my heirloom armoire has been repurposed in the installation as a warping board, a tool for winding the threads you want to prepare for working on the loom.[1]
[1] Ahmed continues to speak about friction. She says that bodies can take the shape of stress, as “points of physical and social pressure that can be experienced as a physical press on the surface of the skin.”(Ahmed, “Conclusion, Disorientation, and Queer Objects,” 165) She talks about this in relation to failed orientation—bodies inhabiting spaces that do not extend to their shape. If we reverse or disorient these limitations, if I repurpose an object, a belonging, and turn it into a tool of craft, or if I take a tool of craft and repurpose it, try to change it, show it in a different way, does that offer something new? I know that reversal is important and says something specific. I have realized I cannot properly weave something when I wind the warp on the reversed and repurposed crown of a family heirloom, but does the gesture of winding that warp say something different, something useful in and of itself? Adamson might agree with me, when he writes that craft might be conceived as a constellation of stars, useful for purposes of navigation but impossible to actually inhabit(Adamson, Thinking Through Craft, 6).
I have been preparing yarn to be woven and making mistakes.[1] I have been covering things in wax and remaking them in metal, I want to prove things are holy[2] but I can’t figure out how.
[1]. Something you learn about weaving (not first, but second, because no one ever thinks you should set up your loom by yourself the first time you weave) is how much of it doesn’t even include the sweet back and forth dance of the actual sitting at the loom weaving—that is to say, tucking the weft threads into the warp threads in shifting patterns, using the shafts and peddles of the loom. I need to say that I don’t think this is the correct way to teach weaving. I had to fight with technicians and instructors to set up a loom the first time, and it made me fall in love with weaving so much more deeply and fervently than I would have otherwise. You can’t love someone until you know all their tricky little difficult quirks and the work it takes to know them makes you understand why they are so loveable in the first place.
[2]. In weaving, in working with textile in general, because the same can be said of knit structures etc. etc. there is the sweet similarity between Holy and Hole-y. Mainly I appreciate that the most revered, special objects are the worn ones, material that has been through a life and shows the scars of that life. Patched holes are another matter entirely, but also important.
I have been unweaving[1] plain factory-woven fabric, thinking about how quickly those threads were put into place mechanically, and how much time it takes my fingers to coax them apart from each other.
[1]. Unweaving by hand involves making a small cut in the fabric and then continuously working it apart from itself thread by thread. This process is similar in time and attention to the process of weaving itself, though slightly less physical, as you can do it sitting in a chair watching reality tv. The fact that destruction by hand can be just as arduous as creation is not lost on me.
Rachel Ormshaw 