The Poetics of Textiles — Tim McLaughlin

Like all great arts, textiles recreate our visiton of the world. We hold them up as exemplars of skill, ingenuity, creativity, and ambition. Textiles are poetic metaphors woven from ideas just as much as they are physical items woven from fibres.

For more than 15 years, Tim McLaughlin has been working to help tell the story of textiles — in video documentaries, publications, photos, exhibitions, and media. This work has been collaborative and far reaching. In many ways it can also be seen as an extension of Tim’s background in the arts and sciences and his personal projects.

Tim will draw in these projects, as well has his research, writing, and considerable experience with Maiwa to argue for textiles as carriers of meaning that are more important today than ever before.

Here are some links to some of the content mentioned in the lecture.

Charllotte Kwon’s Introduction

Tim McLaughlin’s website TMCL.CA where excerpts from his journals may be found

An early bit of experimental writing 25 ways to close a photograph.

Pablo Neruda - Ode to Things

Thomas Carlyle Sartor Resartus

John Ruskin Stones of Venice

Mahatma Gandhi and John Ruskin’s Unto This Last

Susanna Bauer’s Stitched Leaves

Iris van Herpen feature in the New Yorker , and a video of the Syntopia collection.

Closing quote from Revisiting A Quiet Manifesto for the Preservation of Craft

The Following is a Transcript of the Podcast

Hello, I'm Liberty Erickson and this is the Maiwa podcast. The lecture, The Poetics of Textiles, was recorded live Tuesday, October 16, 2018 as part of the Maiwa School of Textiles lecture series held in Vancouver, Canada. This podcast contains excerpts from the lecture as well as additional photos and video clips that can be found on our Maiwa School of Textiles webpage. The lecture is introduced by Charllotte Kwon and features Tim McLaughlin. Tim is a skilled graphic designer, award winning author and photographer, a teacher, an artist, and much more. Many of you listeners may be familiar with the work Tim has done with Maiwa, from documentaries to co authoring the book “Textiles of the Banjara: Cloth and Culture of a Wandering Tribe”. Or perhaps you have taken his workshop where he teaches how to make natural inks. Join us as we explore some of Tim's own personal projects and musings and their application to the world of textiles, transcending the physicalness of textiles and connecting it to the world of ideas and metaphor.

Introduction by Charllotte Kwon

I would like to take this opportunity to introduce you to Tim McLaughlin, the artist, the writer, the chemist, the book designer, the ink maker, the photographer, the traveler, the filmmaker. Tim holds an MA in Philosophy of Science from the University of Western Ontario. For over 25 years he was active in experimental radio and hypertext fiction, for which he is included in the Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. In 2014, Tim took second prize in the PX Three Paris photo competition for his photos, Portraits Found and Taken. In 2015 and 2017 Tim was appointed Shadbolt Community Scholar, Graduate Liberal Studies, Simon Fraser University. Tim has written for Hali Magazine, the Victoria and Albert Museum magazine, Surface Design magazine, among many others. Tim's work is regularly exhibited in gallery spaces in Vancouver and on the Sunshine Coast. He co-wrote, with me, the book Textiles of the Banjara, published by Thames and Hudson. But in addition, you may not have realized he designed the entire book. Tim is a designer extraordinaire and in fact, before coming to Maiwa, Tim was a sought after graphic designer. After we contracted him to do the graphics for our exhibition in 2002 at the Vancouver Museum called Through the Eye of a Needle: Stories from an Indian Desert, we found ways to keep Tim gainfully employed at Maiwa ever since. 

Tim is one of the most creative people I have ever met. He truly lives the creative life. He has a daily writing, drawing, painting, calligraphy practice, and it is a delight for me to live amongst its midst. I get to be the recipient of many, many letters, exquisite letters that come from imaginary countries, countries that he's mapped, designed the commemorative stamps for imaginary leaders and imaginary statutory holidays that he's created. He created his own saffron gin one time and then designed an entire campaign for a launch of it in India. I believed this for weeks until I realized all his copy, drawings, meetings, etc. were fabricated. 

He is often up in the wee hours extracting plants for inks and pigments, photographing in perfect tender morning light, cooking journals in the oven, painting portraits with iron gall ink, writing letters, writing New Yorker reviews for imaginary books. You know, normal 6:00 a.m. stuff. 

This evening Tim will take us on a journey of his musings - The Poetics of Textiles, so aptly named for a journey that only Tim could take us on. I'd like to welcome Tim McLaughlin .  .  . 

Thank you Charllotte and thank you everyone who have come tonight. Especially, I want to thank the extended Maiwa family who have supported me on this incredible creative journey in more ways than I could possibly name in every imaginal facet. It is truly an honour to work among such incredible people. I know of no other company that is also a family in the deep and meaningful way that Maiwa is. I count myself very privileged to be among them. Welcome. 

In the 1994 film il Postino, directed by Michael Radford and Massimo Triosi, a postman named Mario is hired to deliver mail to a single house. The house is on the side of a hill looking out at the sea. The house is on the island of Capri in Italy. It is the house that Chilean poet Pablo Neruda lives in while in exile. The year is 1952.  Earlier in the film, Neruda has explained a little bit about poetry to the postman. He's explained metaphor. The postman then asks for an explanation of one of Neruda's famous lines -  “The smell of barbershops makes me sob”. He asks, why? Why? The smell of barbershops makes me sob. The poet replies “I can't tell you in words different from those I've used”.

When you explain it, poetry becomes banal. Better than any explanation is the experience of feelings that poetry can reveal to a nature open enough to understand it. The postman is shy and hesitant but very curious about the life of the writer. The two become friends. One day on the beach, Neruda recites one of his poems about the sea to the postman. The postman feels an odd sensation on hearing the poetry. He says he felt strange, almost seasick, in fact. He felt like a boat tossing around on those words. Neruda tells Mario that he has just invented a metaphor. The postman is taken aback. He ponders this and then says, you mean that the whole world with the sea, the sky, the rain, the clouds, the whole world is a metaphor for something else?  Metaphor. When I say the sky is the sea, I'm able to work a kind of magic. I'm able to transfer the qualities of one thing onto another. The effectiveness of the metaphor depends on the two things being compared and the person considering the comparison. The more sympathy that exists between all three, the more powerful the metaphor. This is a good place to start. 

Metaphor is a kind of magic which allows one thing to be another. I want to look at textiles for their power as metaphors. Textiles are poetic metaphors woven from ideas just as much as they are physical objects woven from fibres. And to say this is to give a metaphor about the metaphoric nature of textiles. Where does poetics fit in? What does the term poetics mean? The poetics is a treatise by Aristotle written in 335 BC. In the treatise, Aristotle talks about the structure of poetry as a dramatic form. He breaks it into its component parts, analyzes these, and details how they are related to each other and function. That type of analysis is very Aristotelian. The Greek word “poem” just means a made thing. The term poetry literally means making. And so you can have the poetics of gardens or the poetics of architecture or the poetics of textiles. The Greek word poem just means a made thing. All textiles are made things. So it follows that all textiles are poems. Yes, that's an idea I could get behind. Of course, by this reasoning, all crafted things, all made things, partake of this poetic nature, not just textiles. 

I think this is an important point that we should return to - the poetic nature of made things. But textiles are what interests us tonight. So it is the act of creating textiles, which I wish to examine. But first, a short anecdote about this lecture. When Charllotte Kwon, owner and founder of Maiwa, asked me to present a lecture, I asked her, what should I talk about? She replied that I could talk about whatever I wanted, but that people want to know who you are. So who am I? Let me try to answer that question in a way that will throw light on the theme of tonight's lecture. 

I grew up in London, Ontario. I was 20 years old in 1985. I grew up in suburbia. London, Ontario, was a very conservative place. One of its chief industries was life insurance. It would be accurate to say I avoided despair at living in suburbia by remembering two key facts. The first is that the American poet Wallace Stevens sold life insurance. And the second is that the Canadian poet Michael Ondaatje wrote The Collected works of Billy the Kid while living in London, Ontario. Many of you are familiar with Michael Ondaatje, author of the English Patient. His small book, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid won him the Governor General's award for poetry. It is a razor sharp book, clean and spare, and yet filled with a kind of violent beauty. I got involved in community radio, hosted a radio show, released a book of writings from the show, traveled a little and headed west. I became involved in experimental writing formats. 

I once told the publicist for the Vancouver Writers Festival that I've always felt the essential atoms of literature are ideas. Narrative, character, plot, and so on have value to the writer as specific types of ideas. They are no more important than other writerly ideas such as metaphor, meter, and voice. The writer combines words to make a sentence and ideas to make a work. I released something called A Hypertext Fiction, which got me an entry in the Encyclopedia of Canadian Literature and a feature review in the Globe and Mail. Shorter works were written for what was a new format at the time, something called the World Wide Web. These got favourable reviews in the LA Times and the New York Times and the Vancouver Sun. So what were these experimental works like? 

Well, they circle around an interest that I have had all my life for writing and photography. I often begin with found photos, old picture postcards or ephemera that could be found in second hand shops and used bookstores. I would work to transform them. This is a silkscreen print that I did based on the previous image. Throughout these works, my goal was not to be disruptive, but to explore the notion of writing through new pathways. The computer interface opened up new possibilities of constructing a literary work. In this work, each square in the image gave you access to a fragment of a story. 

There is no correct ordering of the narrative. A printed book forces a linear progression, beginning, middle and end. However, this interface introduced a nonlinear structure. At the time, it was revolutionary. Today we've normalized it. Anyone who surfs the web reads in a non linear way. But that non linear structure is very sympathetic to photography. The famous American photographer Richard Avedon opens his work autobiography with the following lines - “I haven't lived chronologically. No one does. Each moment reaches backwards and forwards to all other moments. The interweaving of elements from my life's work out of chronology as echoes and foreshadowings is true, I think, to the inner shape of any life.”

In addition to using the computer interface as a way to present a nonlinear narrative, I also saw the potential of writing through a photograph instead of a graphic fragment. For example, you could access text by selecting a figure in a group photograph. Let me show you. I want to introduce you to three men. They are part of this group of 25 businessmen. I found this in a secondhand bookshop in Vancouver. The way this works in the interface is you would choose a man and click on his face. So let's give the illusion of how that works here. Let's choose this man. And the text reads - he is the type of person who dreams that he wears deep sea gear to swim out up under the rust hulled frigates with a drill made from turns of his wife's hair. The scouls, all one by one, slip lazily under the blue waterline, spilling coal, slag and sheet metal into the silvered sleep of fish. 

How about this one? He was a man so poor that even the shoeshine boys used him as a rag. Finally, how about him? He was the type of man who believed that an object's importance did not consist of utility or economic value, but resided entirely in the number of words necessary for a complete description. He proved that certain people go blind, not by degrees or by colours, but object by object, categorically. As if one day you woke up to discover you could no longer see wardrobes. On the second day, the Ottoman chaise lounge and sideboard were gone, and on the third day you became blind to all furniture. 

The work plays on a tendency I think we all have when we come across a photograph, to read the photograph as if it were biography, to imagine a life for the subject. I've done this in a kind of magic realist prose poetry style. The group photo works perfectly to bind the writing and the structure of the piece. This work was presented at the Vancouver Writers Festival during their poetry bash just over there at Performance Works. I read the character descriptions to the accompaniment of an eight piece jazz band. It was great. 

I also worked with a group of women. Let's meet three of them. How about her? She was the type of person who always had a close relative in an asylum. And now her - she was the type of person who had a face so long that to furrow her brow would have kept plowman busy for three fortnights. She was not sad, and she rubbed the leaves of orange trees between her fingers to dispel the air of melancholy that hung to her countenance like heavy weather. Upon her vast forehead thoughts broke with the phosphine crests of moonlit waves, and in barside conversations strangers would sail small vessels out over the hypnotic waters, lucid in the humpback roll and heave of her contemplations. And finally, she was the type of person who liked to sit on park benches and imagine that she was waiting for a train. 

Obviously, the work required some technical skill to program. However, the essence of the work, and I feel this is important, has nothing to do with technology. I once read a comment on an author that he could describe a character more vividly in a few lines than most authors could do in an entire novel. That was my starting point for the character descriptions. I wrote them, and one day, while working in one of my journals, I cut up the printouts and pasted them over the photographs. The result was more powerful than I expected. That notebook is just one.

I find the notebooks I find in notebooks a handmade quality that is absent from the computer. Each medium has its strengths and its weaknesses. I gravitate to both. A daily writing practice eventually led me to the production of ink, but that is another lecture, and my fascination with character led me to portrait photography. And that is also another lecture. 

I want to exit out out of this very short autobiographical section by offering the following answer to the question, who am I? I am a man who writes a little each day, word by word, building up books that now fill many shelves. The books are emblematic of how works grow over time, of how simple processes that are repeated take on a life of their own. They are handmade things, some literally constructed and bound by myself and others filled with words and thoughts and observations and plans. Now I want to turn back to Neruda. There's a reason I introduced him at the opening. I want to read you a poem, Ode to Things. 

Ode to things. 

I have a crazy, crazy love of things. I like pliers and scissors. I love cups, rings, and bowls, not to speak, of course, of hats. I love all things, not just the grandest, also the infinitely small - thimbles, spurs, plates, and flower vases. Oh yes, the planet is sublime. It is full of pipes weaving handheld through tobacco smoke and keys and salt shakers. Everything, I mean that is made by the hand of a person. Every little thing, shapely shoes and fabric and each new bloodless birth of gold eyeglasses, carpenter's nails, brushes, clocks, compasses and coins, and the so soft softness of chairs. Humankind has built oh so many perfect things, built them of wool and of wood, of glass and of rope, remarkable tables, ships, and stairways. I love all things, not because they are passionate or sweet smelling, but because, I don't know, because this ocean is yours and mine. These buttons and wheels and little forgotten treasures, fans upon whose feathers love has scattered its blossoms, glasses, knives and scissors all bear a trace of someone's fingers on their handle or surface, the trace of a distant hand lost in the depths of forgetfulness. I pause in houses, streets, and elevators, touching things, identifying objects that I secretly covet. This one because it rings, that one because it's as soft as the softness of a woman's hip, that one for its deep sea colour and that one for its velvet feel. Oh, irrevocable river of things, no one can say that I loved only fish or the plants of the jungle and field, that I loved only those things that leap and climb, desire and survive. It's not true. Many things conspired to tell me the whole story. Not only did they touch me or my hand touched them, they were so close that they were part of my being. They were so alive with me that they lived half my life and will die half my death. 

What Neruda argues for is what every craftsperson feels intuitively, that things and objects matter, that we have a relationship with them, and that this relationship is a human one. By pointing this out, we're not being overly sentimental. We are placing emphasis on objects of importance and bringing to light the idea that the objects which surround us should have a life and should age as if they themselves were alive. 

The weaver Mary Zikafoose echoed these ideas when she co-presented a lecture at the Maiwa School of Textiles in 2017. She says,“We must remember that the over and under manipulation of individual fibres it is a simple, repetitive process which, when plied with intention, artistic vision, and inspired craftsmanship, becomes the agent for textile objects of legend.” 

The act of creating textiles happens stitch by stitch, thread by thread. It happens in the same way that a journey happens, step by step, in the same way that writing happens, word by word. And in the same way of building a house happens brick by brick, board by board, nail by nail. Anyone can take a step, do a stitch, write a word, hammer a nail. But when these simple acts are performed with determinism and vision, the results become heroic acts. The results become what Mary Zikafoose calls “textile objects of legend.” People have felt this before. 

John Ruskin, the famous victorian art critic, was an early champion of craft and craftspeople. Ruskin was an academic, educated at Oxford, an able draftsman and watercolorist, Ruskin begins his writings about art and craft about 35 years after the Luddite riots. He is writing at a time when the industrial working class were well and truly established and exploited. So what Ruskin argues for is not only that handmade things should have more importance and prestige than something that is stamped in a factory, but that the craftsperson, through their intimate relationship with the act of making, has a sensibility. 

Design and material, which is absent in other forms of production. Sorry. Has a sensibility towards design and material, which is absent in other forms of production. Ruskin is a champion of the painter Turner and the pre-Raphaelites, and he is a major influence on William Morris. He is also a peculiar man. Many rumours surround his life. Ruskin's marriage was never consummated. There's controversy over this, but one of the explanations put forth is that Ruskin, who is on familiar terms with sculpture and painting, was so shocked at discovering that, unlike depictions and marbles, real women had pubic hair. He was appalled and could not bring himself to consummate the marriage. 

I want to tell you a little bit about Ruskin now, because later, someone very influential in India reads Ruskin and is deeply motivated by his ideas. Ruskin wanted to democratize workers and aristocracy. It is the 1850s. Ruskin saw the aristocracy, gentlemen, men of leisure, as men of thought. And like his Victorian contemporaries, he saw craftsmen, makers, labourers, as men of work. He refers to them as operatives. When he writes, we want one man to be always thinking and another to be always working, and we call the one a gentleman and the other an operative, whereas the workman ought often to be thinking and the thinker often to be working, and both should be gentlemen in the best sense. 

The photographs that I've used to illustrate the workmen are from the english photographer Peter Henry Emerson. They're titled Coming Home from the Marshes. Socially, Ruskin wants to level the playing field. Right. He wants the aristocrat to go out and do some work with his hands, and he wants the labourer to be educated and to participate in the world of ideas. Ruskin develops a theory of ornament where he argues for the importance of embellishment. Like many romantic Victorians, he draws his inspiration from the ancients, Roman and Greek civilizations. His theory of ornament will seem peculiar to us living in the modern world, but let me try to outline it because it'll tie into tonight's theme. 

This is a painting done by Ruskin in 1852 of the Duke Palace in Venice. And in the foreground here is perhaps the best named bridge in the entire world. This is the bridge of size. This is an engraving of the same building from another angle. Ruskin argues that what is really important in architecture is not structure, but embellishment. That's right. Ornament is the most important element of a building. Maybe some of you are familiar with Victorian architecture.

The houses with wrought iron railings, gables and elaborate cornice work, the V & A Museum, the Royal Albert Hall, the Mumbai railway station. All of these buildings are elaborately detailed and heavily ornamented. The idea that ornament is primary is the exact opposite of what a modern thinker would believe. Today. We would say that ornament is a deceit, a concealment. It is window dressing. It is often there to hide something, the true nature or the defect of the building. So where does John Ruskin get his idea that decoration, ornament, embellishment, veneer is the most important element? He gets it from textiles. Specifically, he gets it from Thomas Carlyle's philosophy of clothes, writing in the 1830s. It is a peculiar and strange work called Sartor Resartus. Carlyle states what many religions have claimed, that the soul is more important than the body. But then he adds something. Not only is the human soul more important than the body, but the soul can only be expressed through clothing. Clothes are the forms which the spirit weaves and wears in manifestation, and by which it both conceals itself in shame and reveals itself in grace. So I don't know if you can read the text on the bottom of this image, but under the naked woman it says - the real and the ideal. 

It's a strange notion, to be sure. I'd love to go into Carlyle in depth, but I won't. Instead, I'll just qualify it by saying that Carlyle's work, Sartor Resartus, is a complex and ambivalent work, along the lines of a Don Quixote or Tristam Shandy. The entire work is presented as editorial commentary on an imaginary work written by an imaginary German philosopher. 

So, given Charllotte's introduction, you can see my sympathy with Thomas Carlyle. It's not a straightforward manifesto, which sets out first principles and makes claims. The language is veiled and fraught with illusion and translation. We're unsure how much to take seriously and how much is parody. Just like life. But the work had enormous influence on key writers and thinkers of its era. Ruskin takes the idea of Carlyle's philosophy of clothes and applies it to architectural theory. The soul of architecture is contained in the veneer of decoration that conceals the exterior walls. For Ruskin, the composition of the veneer exhibits the qualities of dresses and textiles. His working the metaphoric nature of textiles. If textiles are an expression of the human soul, embellishment is an expression of the architectural soul. 

You may already know that victorian tablecloths were required to cover the legs of the table. One interpretation of this is that the Victorians were so sexually repressed that they would become aroused at the sight of naked furniture. However, if we understand table clothing in terms of Carlyle, we see that the body of the table is less important than the covering, and so table clothes become an expression of what is most important. On a less abstract level, Ruskin champions the role of the craftsperson. In his book the Stones of Venice, Ruskin states “Never encourage the manufacture of any article not absolutely necessary in the production of which invention has no share”. That is probably the most awkwardly worded statement of a manifesto I've ever heard. So let me say it again “Never encourage the manufacture of any article not absolutely necessary in the production of which invention has had no share”. Ruskin wants to see the presence of the human hand in the production of things. He wants to see individuality, improvisation and invention. Ruskin had in mind the European crafts. However, we would include all manner of production that is based on a pre-industrial model. Depending on your politics, you either see this image as backward and inefficient or as skillful and artisanal. 

The key thing for Ruskin is that the artisan will make choices during the production process. These decisions are what imbue the work with a deeper meaning. Ruskin's influence, as I said earlier, reaches forward to William Morris. Morris, who embraces both Ruskin's social ideas and his aesthetic ones. Morris will restate the Ruskin quote in a much cleaner format - “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful”. But there is another person even more famous than William Morris, who is influenced by Ruskin. In 1860, Ruskin publishes a work called Unto This Last. It outlines his belief in the equality of different social classes. It contains his criticism of capitalism, especially its exploitation of labor and craftspeople in South Africa. 

In 1904, Mohandas Gandhi reads Ruskin and is transformed. Gandhi begins to publish his own newspaper, named Indian Opinion. Gandhi organizes a collective based on principles taken directly from Ruskin. Everybody gets the same salary without distinction of function, race or nationality. Gandhi translates unto this last into Gujarati. In 1908, it has published under the title Sarvaldaya. Well being of all. Gandhi says - “I believe that I discovered some of my deepest convictions reflected in this great work of Ruskin. And that is why it so captured me and transformed my life.” People know about Gandhi's principle of civil disobedience, about nonviolent protests and about deploying these tactics to end British rule in India. But working from Ruskin, Gandhi combines the idea of craft that craft is the true producer of value with ideas of nationalism and national independence. Pre British India was a textile manufacturing and exporting powerhouse. To give you two ideas of the range of trade that went from India to the world from south India on the Coromandel Coast, printed cottons were designed and sold to the Papanese market in the opposite direction. Printed textiles went to Persia and the Arab world. When India's printed cottons hit the European market, they proved so desirable that they were outlawed. To preserve the local textile manufacturers, the British famously change all this. British mills like these in Manchester take over textile production. At the time of Gandhi, India imported raw cotton to England. The finished goods, but also yarns and threads were then sold back to the Indian population. From the British perspective, it is a huge economic coup. So what does Gandhi do? He engages in nonviolent economic warfare. 

One key plank of his home rule platform, Swadeshi, self reliance, is the principle which will have a massive ramification for the Indian textile industry and by extension, for anyone who's ever been inside the Maiwa store. The textiles emphasize artisan spinning, weaving, dyeing and printing. It's a simple idea. The Indian people will boycott english finished goods and make everything themselves. 

Gandhi famously carries a portable charka, a spinning wheel, with him wherever he goes. Consider the size of the Indian market. If only a fraction of the Indian population participate in Gandhi's Swadeshi movement it will force the closure of hundreds of british mills. And this is exactly what happens. In 1931, Gandhi visits Lancashire. There's a wonderful newsreel footage of Gandhi visiting a mill. All the mill workers welcome him warmly. They are hopeful that he will encourage the Indians to once again purchase their products. The journalist Harold Hayes relayed to the BBC that when some of the old weavers tried to tell Gandhi how bad things were he simply replied, - “My dear, you have no idea what poverty is.” Gandhi has sympathy for the mill workers, but not the mill owners. Gandhi changes what textiles mean. 

He alters the metaphor of making cloth. He turns it into a symbol. Kadhi, hand spun and hand woven, becomes the revolutionary freedom fabric for us. The consequences of the swadeshi movement is to delay the industrialization of India, particularly in the textile sector. Why have so many traditional textile skills survived in India? At least in part is because Gandhi encouraged the idea of ruskin and morris on a national level and used making, rather than destroying, as a tool to gain independence. To give you a deeper idea of the play of these ideas in the present, I have a short video clip. It almost all of that footage was shot in Orissa. Now Odisha. Charllotte and I were there in 2013, documenting ikat traditions. As we moved from area to area, we noticed that the pattern and colour of the ikat saris was regional. You can tell where a woman is from by the design of her ikat. This idea often comes up in India, especially with tribal textiles, where an ethnic identity is expressed through embroidery. Charllotte and I also noticed this with the Banjara textiles. Many Banjara patterns can be assembled by producing variations on the square. 

This was a very curious aspect of design. We could not figure it out until we read an account written by a man who had traveled with the Banjara and recorded his experiences. He said, quote, “They regard themselves as immune from the attacks of tigers if they take certain precautions. Most of them have to pass through places infested with these beasts, and their favourite method of keeping them off is as follows. As soon as they encamp at a place, they level a square bit of ground and light fires in the middle of it, around which they spend the night. It is their firm belief that a tiger will not enter the square from fear, lest it become blind and eventually be shot”. 

The square imagery is most prevalent on larger pieces or ceremonial mats, indicating that the shape has protective qualities for the person sitting within. The geometry pieces also contain mirrors. The mirror deflects ill intentions. They ward off the evil eye, not only deflecting it, but actually reflecting it back against the person sending it. If no mirrors are at hand, an embroiderer could use mica, the reflecting backs of beetles, or embroider a shape where the mirror should go. 

And the pieces, especially pieces designed to be most visible, contain coins or cowry shells. In India, cowry shells were used as money until the mid 18 hundreds. So these pieces are a display of wealth. And finally, the embroidery itself is a display of skill and dexterity. The most highly visible pieces would show a woman's talent and skill. So you have four elements coming together in a single textile. The shapes of the figures are powerful. The mirrors are protective. The coins and cowries are wealth and prestige. The stitches are skill and talent. The entire embroidery is imbued with meaning, protecting the wearer from harm and radiating a potent symbolic magic. This is so far from just a piece of cloth. How foolish must a person be not to wear such clothing? The poetics of textiles - what have we seen? Textiles as an expression of the handmade. Textiles and clothing as an expression of the soul. Textiles as the expression of nationalism. Textiles as protection, wealth, prestige. 

Here are some more pathways for a poetics of textiles. This is a work by Susanna Bauer titled Transplant Number 19. Susanna is a thoughtful maker. Here, in her own words, are some of the implications of her art. 

“There is a fine balance in my work between fragility and strength, literally when it comes to pulling a fine thread through a brittle leaf or thin, dry piece of wood, but also in a wider context, the tenderness and tension in human connections, the transient yet enduring beauty of nature that can be found in the smallest detail, vulnerability and resilience that could be transferred to nature as a whole, or the stories of individual beings.” There's a poignancy in Susanna Bauer's work, caused, I think, by the intersection of the natural and the handmade worlds. Her crochet is so perfect and meticulous that it starts to make nature itself look disorderly. 

This is the work of Danish designer Iris van Herpen from her fall 2018 collection titled Syntopia. In contrast to Susannah Bauer, these works exist in a world of spectacle. Van Herpen's collections are revealed in highly premeditated exhibitions where every aspect of the environment is controlled. For example, at a recent exhibition that was held in a riverside warehouse in Paris, musicians played fantastic instruments that had been designed to be used underwater. The musicians were all held in giant tanks with special lighting and concealed breathing apparatus. 

I show these images to give some context and to show the extent of the staging. Like the textiles themselves, the presentation is both fantastic and meticulous. A very limited number of her works are sold to be worn. Rebecca Mead, writing for the New Yorker on the 10th anniversary of van Herpen's label, it was founded when van Herpen was 23, says - “For the past six years she has presented her work to the public as a guest member of the Chambre de la Haute Couture, a Paris institution that is the fashion world's equivalent of a think tank. Her process is governed by very different considerations and moderations than your normal commercial fashion designer who is designing seasonally with price points and trying to create trends. She is outside that. Her label sells to museums, institutions, and private collections and benefits from corporate collaborations. As may be obvious from these pieces, her designs are often freed from practical requirements. I want to use the work of Iris van Herpen to illustrate the far reaches of a poetics of textiles. This is Iris. I went through a number of stories about her and gathered all the ways that people described her work. 

Van Herpen herself says, - “I often get inspired by materials I cannot work with. I make a start, even if it's impossible. Actress Gwendolyn Christie, who plays Brienne of Tarth in the Game of Thrones series and who has had two dresses made for her, says -  “When you wear her clothes, you do feel as though you are being bound up in the technology of what it is to be alive. It's not like putting on a dress. You are aware that you are wearing someone's entire thought process about how the world functions”. Dancer Clementine de Luis says - “It’s fantastic to dance in this thing. I feel such power. Wearing it was like being between water and leaves and wind”.  This feeling was echoed by my own daughter when I sent her these pictures, she said - “It looks like she's wearing the wind”. 

Iris van Herpen grew up in the Netherlands without the internet, television, or pop culture references. She began sewing her own dresses when she was twelve. Her inspiration is taken from the natural world, her background in ballet, and attentions found in materials. She says - “There is beauty in contrast, new terrains are found at the intersection between precision and chaos, art and science, the human touch and the high tech, the artificial and the organic”. 

Let me repeat that first thought. There is beauty in chaos. Sorry. In contrast, there is beauty in contrast. Van Herpen is known for her high tech fabrics, two-D and three-D printed plastics, metals, crystals, foams, and gauze. But here's the contrast. She estimates that she and her staff make 80% of everything by hand with needle and thread. Some of her dresses take more than six months of handwork to complete. When I first encountered discussions of her work, I was a little perplexed by all the references to craftsmanship because her pieces look as if they were just fabricated all at once. However, the actual process is quite the opposite. So I have a little clip to show you this. 

Rebecca Mead, in the New Yorker article, relates this wonderful moment when Iris and some of her collaborators take a tour of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. I'll quote her directly. Jerry Stafford, a Paris based veteran creative director who visited CERN with van Herpen, told me that while beholding the collider, they realized that all the wiring is hand applied. It is literally like couture, Stafford went on. 

You have all these people weaving these incredible tapestries of wires in order to create this huge magnetic collider in which what happens is invisible. That feels very much like Iris's own world. Van Herpen agrees that her work is about what I would call high tech, slow clothes. 

She says, - “My work is exactly the opposite of what generally fashion is today. I go back to forgotten craftsmanship and a love for handwork, and at the same time I'm embedding new technologies and collaborations with artists, architects, and scientists. I intentionally stretch the edge of my medium. It's hard not to see van Herpen as a continuation of the Japanese designer Issey Miyaki, where van Herpen has replaced the innovative weave structures and handloom fabrics with their high tech equivalents. 

Sue-an van der Zijpp, curator at the Grottener Museum, where van Herpen had a show in 2012, said in an interview - “What really interested me was the way she approached materials. Our culture always maintains a dichotomy between machine made and manmade, and she is merging that. Let me bring me out of van Herpen's world with that thought, the dichotomy of the handmade and the factory made. When I said in my description of this lecture that Poetics of Textiles matters now as never before it is not simply empty rhetoric to entice you to attend a lecture. 

Despite the hopeful examples of van Herpen and Gandhi, I firmly believe that our relationship with material culture, with everything that has been, with everything that is made, is being undermined and subverted. The problem is as old as labour itself. In the 1930s, the French writer Henri Fusion extolled the virtues of the hand as an organ of thought. The most delicate harmonies, he writes, evoking the secret springs of our imagination and sensibility, take form by the hand's action as it works in matter. It is the hand he holds, not the eye, that investigates surfaces, volume, density, and weight. 

And yet our relationship with the human hand is falling away. It's being supplanted by objects which run counter to our values. As craftspeople, we ask so little that what our world is made of not be toxic, that the people who make things not be locked in factories, exploited, wage starved, and physically abused, that our economics reflect our values. It is often claimed that this is a position of privilege, that asking for objects to be fashioned by people you know, even people you love, is elitist, for few people could afford to purchase artisan work, and the mass population must have its cheap goods. 

I believe the opposite, that demanding cheap consumer goods manufactured at the expense of the environment and the expense of distant populations of workers whose very distance allows them to be exploited, is elitist. This is the true position of intolerable privilege. To demand that the world and many of its cultures are sacrificed to produce things not worth producing, and in our disposable age, things not worth keeping. This sentiment is hardly new. It was stated by William Morris in 1890, almost 130 years ago, when he wrote the happiness of the workman at his work, his most elementary comfort and bare health did not weigh a grain of sand in the balance. Against this dire necessity of cheap production of things, a great part of which were not worth producing at all, the whole community was cast into the jaws of the ravening monster - the world market. 

I am critical by nature, but not pessimistic. So let me say that it matters as never before, because we are on the early stages of an artisan renaissance. The connection of makers to markets made possible by online platforms is astounding. The marketing potential for individuals through channels like Instagram and Etsy, is also putting power into the hands of makers. Gone are the days when a small number of gatekeepers decide who gets access to the world market. I am hopeful that the results will be good. Let me close off tonight with a piece that I wrote for Maiwa’s 30th anniversary booklet. It is a short piece that I hope gets at the heart of Poetics of Textiles. Here it is. 

Why do we make? Why do we make when it takes time and effort and expense? Because all acts are creative acts. We make and we tune our making as we go along. Like tuning a violin string, tightening it so much, maybe a little more. And if our judgment is off and a string should snap, we restring the instrument and start again. We make, because, instead of tuning an instrument, we begin to dream of creating one. Shearing hardwoods, mixing varnish, designing the smooth lines that will let the sound out. We make because it is what hands have always done. Because life is a creative act, and because the only meaning that truly exists is the one we make for ourselves. 

Thank you. 

I am happy to take questions, if there are any. 

Question - I’m just really curious about your take on simple design that comes out of Scandinavia. 

Bearing in mind the point made about embellishment and ornamentation being so much the priority. Yes, I would draw the distinction between something that's handmade and factory produced. Those things could be either ornamental or very clean. I'm not against Scandinavian design at all. In fact, Scandinavian design grows out of kind of a farmhouse tradition. If you take design through its history, you can see I've explained victorian design. And of course, as most of you know, after victorian design comes this radical resentment of it, where all we need are clean, square lines, and that goes into the Bauhaus and other design movements. But I have no disdain of Scandinavian design. My disdain is for often the way culturally, we tend to embrace the mass production of really ugly things. 

Did anybody else find the distinction between Carlyle's philosophy of clothes a little bit strange, as I was writing that, I just want to talk about this a little bit, because I've been thinking about it for the past few days quite a lot. If you put yourself in that 1830 environment, you can see everyone at that time would have taken as a clear fact that you have a soul and you have a body, and your body is going to decay and corrupt, but your soul is everlasting.  And your soul, I think that if you start with that understanding, then you start to understand a little bit of how clothing, which is often designed by the person wearing it, especially at that time, can become an expression of something that's eternal. I mean, when we look at that illustration, it just seems bizarre. It just seems so comic. So I've been quite interested to unpack some of those ideas behind it. 

Comment from audience - I think it's even more bizarre if you think about the context of the 1830s. The psychologist Flugel has theorized that men's clothing after the French Revolution, and this is men's clothing across Europe, after the French Revolution, masculinity goes through what he calls the great masculine renunciation, and men start wearing all black to sort of announce their belonging in the public sphere. What's interesting about Ruskin writing in that way about clothing, it's so absolutely disoriented in that larger context. So to return men's clothing, I assume he's talking about men's clothing as well as women's. But to return men's clothing to an expression of the soul in a period of time where the masculine public belonging and leadership is expressed through very plain black clothing, it's really remarkable. But I really enjoyed your talk. Loved it. And I was thinking about that idea of clothing as the expression of the soul. And some very recent research, I think, done in a Canadian university, where it was found that human hands can distinguish one molecule of thickness on a very smooth surface. And so maybe clothing, or at least handmade clothing, is at least the expression of the intelligence of the hand as much as the soul. 

I'd go for that, just for the timelines that we're in, the clothing and the soul, the philosophy of clothes comes out with Thomas Carlyle, 1835. And then Ruskin doesn't start writing till 1850, 1852. So Ruskin interprets Carlyle originally, you go, well, this is not an idea that shows up in a lot of church doctrine. This is not the kind of thing that you read about. And so you think, he must have written a crank that nobody listened to. But if you Google Thomas Carlyle on the web, you'll see there's a lot of Scottish history about him, and there's a lot of characters that show up in things like Vanity Fair. So he's immensely popular in his time. And just to pick up on your point about the hand, yeah. I do think that Charllotte and I and a number of the Maiwa staff who are privileged enough to go to India, we encounter such genius in terms of craft there. And I believe that there is that sensitivity. That's a wonderful thought to think of. That one molecule of depth, maybe it's a thick molecule. Any other questions? Thank you, Tim. I know you're well traveled. 


Question - So do you journal every day? 

I habitually journal. The key to successful journaling is not to expect precious results. The key is just to disfigure a page or two. And then you're not worried. I actually have never been worried about the blankness of a page. I find it quite an inspiration, but I know some people are terrified of it. And if that's your fear, then just make a mark. You're good to go. Yeah. It's a completely different type of experience. I mean, I spend all my day in front of two vast computer monitors, and I'm often connected to a little tiny computer monitor with an iPhone all the time. And working with pen and paper in any form is you think differently, I believe, and you work differently. And it's great to get a sense of that tactile nature. So maybe there'll be an ink making lecture

Thank you, thank you Tim, for that fabulous lecture. It seems to me that something that ties all of this together is this constant search for meaning, that we are a meaning making species and that we must find meaning in things. And so everything, like the oath to things, Neruda, that you read was right down to this. Choices add meaning. When you were talking about from Carlisle and the close expressing the soul, it seemed to me that there's constant through all of this is trying to find, to make meaning out of the world that we're in and that we look in all these different avenues, trying to find it, and that textiles is one area where it's a form of vocabulary, and that we use that to make meaning, so that we are always looking to find a way to make meaning in the journaling and painting. And whatever we do, we're always chasing meaning. What do you think? 

I agree. Just to unpack that a little bit, I am a little bit playing to the house tonight. I know there's going to be a lot of textile people here. I'm very interested in textiles myself, and one of the things that I can't stop myself from doing is trying to unpack the meaning of textiles, both the creative process and the finished article. And I think if I have a small skill, it is sometimes the ability to be able to interpret textile work and place it in a context to help that meaning along in a way that doesn't do violence to the maker of the work or the idea of the work. As anybody who knows me, I cannot stop making meaning out of things. I'm a terrible punner. I'm always making, reinterpreting something. I can never give a straight answer because I immediately see about three or four answers to any given question. But I think also what we're obliged to do a little bit is to become advocates for our idea of meaning. And that, I hope, has come across a little bit tonight. I can search through textiles for these meanings, but some, to me are more important than others. 

The esoteric ones, I think, give context for the ones that come later. And so the only reason I bring Carlisle in is because he influences Ruskin, and Ruskin influences Gandhi, and Gandhi influences all of India. And then this story is possible, and my life is possible. So in a way, I'm drawing all those connections together. I have to tell you one secret, though, which I couldn't figure out a way to put it into an anecdote. Charllotte and I, of course, are together, and I've worked on this lecture for a long time, and I wouldn't show it to her. And she's been so patient and gracious through all that. I would just like to take this opportunity to thank her publicly. 

You have been listening to a Maiwa Podcast. The lecture, The Poetics of Textiles, was recorded live Tuesday, October 16, 2018, as part of the Maiwa School of Textiles lecture series held in Vancouver, Canada. The lecture is introduced by Charllotte Kwon and features Tim McLaughlin. The podcast you have just heard consists of excerpts from the lecture and was first posted in 2019. For this podcast, we have posted extra content on our Podcast web page, including photos and short videos. You can access this extra content and the rest of the Maiwa Podcast on the Maiwa School of Textile's website at schooloftextile.com. That's Schooloftextiles.com. All one word. For more information about Maiwa and all that we do, please visit our website at maiwa.com. That's maiwa.com. I'm Liberty Erickson, and thank you for listening.