Text & Techne, Textile Poetics | Poetic Textiles

Textile poem or poetic textiles? Can works that result out of the entanglement of the language of poetry and that of textiles help us to move beyond binaries to which we are doomed to even when searching for a term to refer to these works? Poetry is often refereed to as a craft rooted in the making of a poem; similarly, textiles are often referred to as a form of language, one that disregards most of the elements that we are accustomed to in the way we understand and experience the written language of poetry: from ideas of linearity to a supposed superiority of sight over touch.

The last decades have seen a proliferation of works that combine textile practices and poetic language, especially by women artists and poets. Textile arts have often been understood as a particularly ‘female’ form of writing or expression in literature. Ovid’s Philomela, after her rape and after her tongue has been cut out, communicates her story through a non-verbal means of weaving, and Homer’s Penelope weaves and enweaves her textile every day until Odysseus comes home. The conference aims to stimulate conversations around contemporary works across languages, literatures, and different periods of time, that engage with the language of poetry and that of textiles.

In addition, the conference aims to re-evaluate how a poetics of making
situated in textiles is not of less artistic value, but rather, it has been one of the most innovative ways in which poets and artists have been renewing our understanding of poetic language, reading practices, and the involvement of haptic experience when engaging with intermedial works. In The Subversive Stich: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (1986), Rozsika Parker highlights the divide between arts and crafts, fine arts and decorative arts, high art and textile art. This historical hierarchical division of the arts results directly from the patriarchal structures that see women’s production as separate, something that is at the root of the marginalisation of women’s work. Art forms historically associated with women have been continuously downgraded and accorded lower artistic value. The engagement with textiles, like embroidery and weaving, has been historically consigned to women’s hands. However, it has also be employed by women to comment on the gendered reception of their work through textiles and, more broadly, to resist the constraints of femininity. Textiles have been used by women as an effective medium to comment on their conditions using the same tools – textiles – used to marginalise them. This subversive strategy is at the core of many women poets and artists working with the language of poetry and textiles.