Week 2 - Ou est la biblioteque?
One of many finds
Plenty of fun this week as well! When publishing the last update I mentioned I'd be heading to the Central St Martin's library to get a few hours of reading in before I went out for the evening. There's really nothign that compares to browsing the stacks nad discovering a million (potentially) relevant books, smelling the old pages and wondering what secrets are trapped on the shelf. I got a little too excited at first, and managed to grab about 20 books in a huge pile, but with only a few hours it became more a game of sifting and sorting the useful stuff from the pointless stuff.
I made a few discoveries, and managed to read a few shorter books that at least set the record straight on what reading to avoid. There was a particular book on tie-dye which I hoped would be a general history of tie-dye or something like that. You'd think with a name like Tie-Die: fashion from hippie to chic and it being in a university library, that it would be a book of academic weight and value. Not so, it was a mass market coffee table book with a short essay at the beginning written by a journalist so far as I can tell, and then 80 pages of pictures of people wearing tie-dye, most of them modern. There's nothing wrong with this of course, but as there were no pictures of anything Marian had made, it wasn't exactly a worthwhile book for context other than "here's some people wearing it". 1
More fruitful was some excellent reading by the unsinkable Mary Schoeser, a friend of this Foundation and of Marian, who wrote a book on how to approach the study of textiles as objects. I dind't get to reading it, that's to come, but just finding it was a treasure! There was also an excellent glossy book on fashion in the 90s I wanted to grab, but was too big to fit in my bag. 2 That plus a couple other books on plus size fashion (thinking of how Marian designed for woman "of a certain age") and a book on craft and contemporary art caught my eye. I didn't have the ability to check books out yet, but I'll be back soon enough.
I ventured to the British Library on Tuesday with Aisling (my friend and co-founding trustee) and did plenty of reading to try and get my head wrapped around some of the concepts I'm wrestling with. I can't pretend I solved all the world's problems, but some of the material was very educative. Two books with the same title (Surface Design on Fabric) highlighted good and bad practice in how to approach indigenous techniques, with the older of the two being far better and more in touch with indigenous knowledge and culture, and the newer being entirely white-washed. I was very glad to see the older one also had a surprise Marian attribution in it!
Talking of Surface Design, here’s Second Ceremonial Enclosure (1972), one of Marian’s many three-dimensional pieces.
I ventured to the British Library on Tuesday with Aisling (my friend and co-founding trustee) and did plenty of reading to try and get my head wrapped around some of the concepts I'm wrestling with. I can't pretend I solved all the world's problems, but some of the material was very educative. Two books with the same title (Surface Design on Fabric) highlighted good and bad practice in how to approach indigenous techniques, with the older of the two being far better and more in touch with indigenous knowledge and culture, and the newer being entirely white-washed. I was very glad to see the older one also had a surprise Marian attribution in it!
This older one was Surface Design on Fabric by Proctor and Lew.
I also found a few interesting articles in the Fiberarts and Surface Design Journal publications discussing issues of approaches to fiber art and a precis of the book on craft and contemporary art and where one should apply to the other.
It's very interesting to consider the intersections between each discipline. High/fine art looks down on craft, but then fiber art also seems to have a dog in the fight and is traditionally left out of fine art but has layers of fashion vs art within it, then all of that intersects with craft. How does a maker creating fiber art interpret their work when a craftsperson making a garment is also lumped into the same world. Where does craft end and art begin? Before last week I'd have said you could conflate them, why make the distinction, but fiber art creators have a very strong opinion (it seems) that they don't WANT to be considered in the same breath as fine art. So there is no pleasing anyone, and that feels the most accurate.
1. Despite this, however, I did find that the journalist who wrote the introductory essay did use Marian's art as an example of increasing feminism in the 70s through tie-dye, which was a nice suprirse to find in the wild.
2. Steele, V, Hill, C. Reinvention and Restlessness: Fashion in the 90s, Rizzoli International Publications (New York, USA), 2021