Dont Tell Me Embroidery Is Relaxing.

Don’t tell me embroidery is relaxing.

“By the eighteenth century embroidery was beginning to signify a leisured, aristocratic life style — not working was becoming the hallmark of femininity.” (The Subversive Stitch, Rozsika Parker, 1984: 11)

Women’s work as an oxymoron: if women do it, it cannot be work. Women cannot work, so anything a woman does cannot be work. Therefore, embroidery, actually called ‘work’ by women, cannot be classified as work. It is instead, a leisure pursuit – assuming one is not paid for it. And one cannot be paid for it because it is not work, cannot be work if it is produced by an upperclass woman. To try and pay her for it – for her to try and sell it would be to undermine her husband’s fragile masculinity by implying he cannot support her. But all of this is to say nothing of the women who did do embroidery as work, as a living, who did sell their labour. 

I think this is one of the reasons I get irritated by people telling me it must be so relaxing to sew. I don’t find it relaxing. It is work. It is labour and it is my job. I don’t tell other people that their work, their job, the thing they do everyday must be ‘so relaxing’ because that would be an absurd assumption to make. Maybe they do find it relaxing. Or maybe they enjoy it, but don’t find it relaxing because actually it’s hard work and concentration. But it is not my place to assume these things, and of all the questions one could ask about another’s job, whether it is ‘relaxing’ is a strange place to start. What are people implying when they tell me I must find embroidery relaxing? That it’s easy? Unskilled? Requires no concentration? That it’s not work. 

Some people find embroidery relaxing because they do it as a hobby. They do it as a thing which is not their job. Just as some people take up wood-carving as a hobby. But do people tell the professional carpenter that their job must be relaxing because it is considered by others to be a hobby? 

Don’t tell me my job is relaxing. Don’t tell me my job isn’t work. 

I'm running a workshop (co-designed with colleague, who is a star and also did most of the prep whilst I was busy talking about the Stitched Iliad at UCL's Homeric Summer School) this weekend at the festival as well. I'll post photos from that later.

Book 1 & 2 exhibited together at the Beyond the Borders festival.

Writing a poem which you can’t read to anyone Is just like dancing in the dark.

Ovid, Epistulae ex Ponto IV.II.33-34 (via thoodleoo)

I wonder how important he thought it was that it actually be "read" in the literal sense. Would Ovid think that the stitched Iliad is like dancing in the dark? Or would he say "okay, poems that can't be seen or heard."

But I understand his pain: some people write poems or books or create art for themselves, or to express themselves and having expressed themselves, they don't care if they actually expressed themselves *to another* person or not. (Indeed, they might prefer it if they knew they hadn't). Other people do it to communicate: they do it to express themselves and they need or greatly desire that *someone* see/hear/feel what they did.

Some people see art as self-expression and as having value intrinsically as self-expression, some people see it as having value only insofar as it allows or succeeds as communication with another person: do you create art for yourself, or for others? (Of course one might argue that even if creating art to be understood by others, it's still ultimately being created *for* the artist, to satisfy their desire to communicate...)

my night manager (who is a gay man) and i sometimes sit down and exchange stories and tidbits about our sexuality and our experiences in the queer cultural enclave. and tonight he and i were talking about the AIDS epidemic. he’s about 50 years old. talking to him about it really hit me hard. like, at one point i commented, “yeah, i’ve heard that every gay person who lived through the epidemic knew at least 2 or 3 people who died,” and he was like “2 or 3? if you went to any bar in manhattan from 1980 to 1990, you knew at least two or three dozen. and if you worked at gay men’s health crisis, you knew hundreds.” and he just listed off so many of his friends who died from it, people who he knew personally and for years. and he even said he has no idea how he made it out alive.

it was really interesting because he said before the aids epidemic, being gay was almost cool. like, it was really becoming accepted. but aids forced everyone back in the closet. it destroyed friendships, relationships, so many cultural centers closed down over it. it basically obliterated all of the progress that queer people had made in the past 50 years.

and like, it’s weird to me, and what i brought to the conversation (i really couldn’t say much though, i was speechless mostly) was like, it’s so weird to me that there’s no continuity in our history? like, aids literally destroyed an entire generation of queer people and our culture. and when you think about it, we are really the first generation of queer people after the aids epidemic. but like, when does anyone our age (16-28 i guess?) ever really talk about aids in terms of the history of queer people? like it’s almost totally forgotten. but it was so huge. imagine that. like, dozens of your friends just dropping dead around you, and you had no idea why, no idea how, and no idea if you would be the next person to die. and it wasn’t a quick death. you would waste away for months and become emaciated and then, eventually, die. and i know it’s kinda sophomoric to suggest this, but like, imagine that happening today with blogs and the internet? like people would just disappear off your tumblr, facebook, instagram, etc. and eventually you’d find out from someone “oh yeah, they and four of their friends died from aids.”

so idk. it was really moving to hear it from someone who experienced it firsthand. and that’s the outrageous thing - every queer person you meet over the age of, what, 40? has a story to tell about aids. every time you see a queer person over the age of 40, you know they had friends who died of aids. so idk, i feel like we as the first generation of queer people coming out of the epidemic really have a responsibility to do justice to the history of aids, and we haven’t been doing a very good job of it.

Don’t tell me embroidery is relaxing.

“By the eighteenth century embroidery was beginning to signify a leisured, aristocratic life style — not working was becoming the hallmark of femininity.” (The Subversive Stitch, Rozsika Parker, 1984: 11)

Women’s work as an oxymoron: if women do it, it cannot be work. Women cannot work, so anything a woman does cannot be work. Therefore, embroidery, actually called ‘work’ by women, cannot be classified as work. It is instead, a leisure pursuit -- assuming one is not paid for it. And one cannot be paid for it because it is not work, cannot be work if it is produced by an upperclass woman. To try and pay her for it -- for her to try and sell it would be to undermine her husband’s fragile masculinity by implying he cannot support her. But all of this is to say nothing of the women who did do embroidery as work, as a living, who did sell their labour. 

I think this is one of the reasons I get irritated by people telling me it must be so relaxing to sew. I don’t find it relaxing. It is work. It is labour and it is my job. I don’t tell other people that their work, their job, the thing they do everyday must be ‘so relaxing’ because that would be an absurd assumption to make. Maybe they do find it relaxing. Or maybe they enjoy it, but don’t find it relaxing because actually it’s hard work and concentration. But it is not my place to assume these things, and of all the questions one could ask about another’s job, whether it is ‘relaxing’ is a strange place to start. What are people implying when they tell me I must find embroidery relaxing? That it’s easy? Unskilled? Requires no concentration? That it’s not work. 

Some people find embroidery relaxing because they do it as a hobby. They do it as a thing which is not their job. Just as some people take up wood-carving as a hobby. But do people tell the professional carpenter that their job must be relaxing because it is considered by others to be a hobby? 

Don’t tell me my job is relaxing. Don’t tell me my job isn’t work. 

Timaeus 1: tetrahedron prototype.

I’m the kind of person who’s too impatient to wait for there to be good daylight and make sure there’s no crap in the background for me to take photos and post them, so here are some photos taken at night, under artificial light, with some bags in the background (my office is my studio is my lounge. Mess is inevitable).

Anyway, somewhat delightfully ironic to call this a prototype, since prototype can mean both the first thing you make which you then go on to perfect, or the thing from which all future models are derived: almost like a platonic form. The form which is to be perfected in future models and the perfect form from which all later (imperfect) models will be derived are represented by the same word.

Why is that ironic? Because a tetrahedron is one of five Platonic solids (tetrahedron, hexahedron [more commonly known as a cube], octohedron, dodecahedron, icosahedron): it's a platonic form. It's the prototype for all tetrahedrons. Except I'm hoping that the next ones I make will be more perfect that this. My prototype/Platonic form is imperfect and rough. But it is still the first manifestation of the basic concept from which all the others will be built.

I will (hopefully) explain more about the Timaeus (A Platonic dialogue where these solids are mentioned) as I make more and expand/explore/refine.