Good Friend Design Consultant S contacted me and shared her apprehension about participating.
"I am not sure my memory will be good enough or interesting enough" She said.
"Well," I said. "It can be simple. Just as mundane as what you ate for breakfast"
"I'll get back to you" she replied
After a while I got an email with an account of the first day of school.
"I am about to experience this moment-turned-memory for the 28th time. Although it is now familiar, anticipation of this moment includes equal parts of excitement and nervousness. This moment causes nightmares and strange dreams. Preparation for this moment is incredibly important and time consuming. What happens in this moment impacts an entire year of my life.
This memory includes a crispness, newness, and orderliness to it. There is a lot of smiling and tedium in this memory. Freedom and a relaxed state of being vanish, yet everything is possible. Creativity and idea generation become consuming. It is a chance to start anew.
My favorite (dreaded) memory is the first day of school."
Inspiration came in the form of my own queasiness and a few images:
From these images we emailed back and forth about the awkwardness and vulnerability of the final image of horse-children and the confined but hopeful feeling of the butterfly.
I was drawn to the simplicity of the butterfly in the jar. I first made one illustration with the jar closed. The Consultant suggested the jar be opened slightly.
That image is here:
Please click, print out, modify, and use for your own stitching
To work with the ideas of awkwardness and vulnerability I decided to stitch upon a canvas apron. Typically used for art-making, these aprons restrict movement, but also protect. An apron, like a mask for the body, also hides part of ourselves from view but also keeps that part of us clean. The stiffness of canvas produces restricted movement, perhaps like the first day of school. Is not the awkward positioning and posing of the first day of school is often in service of such protection?
Work of the Hand, Work of the Heart
We have an obsession with the ‘hand-made.’ We seek out these items at craft fairs, and local stores. They are inevitably expensive. But, what exactly are we paying for when we buy that $35 dishtowel? We are purchasing something that shows signs of human labor. In other words, something imperfect, irregular and in that way intimate.
Elaine Freedgood has argued in her article “"Fine Fingers": Victorian Handmade Lace and Utopian Consumption” that we purchase these items out of a capitalist consumer burn-out. We are exhausted with the displacement of human interaction enacted by commodity fetishism. The object replaces, is a surrogate for, social relations. By purchasing something made by hand we seem to recuperate, if only partially, some sort of human interaction or relationship. Of course, as Freedgood suggests, no relationship is made. We end up fetishizing imagined hands rather than objects (why else would we buy an irregular, flawed object?). Hands end up being metonymic for the maker, with whom we never engage. The body is dismembered—and dis-remembered—the hand is amputated from the body, the laborer amputated from the object exchange.
In essence, the hands work of the hand replaces the work of the heart. What I mean by this is by obsessing about handmade-ness we forget the affective engagement of the maker.
Of course, here I use a cliché that, in effect, dismembers the body again. I intend, despite this writerly move, to use ‘work of the heart’ to mean the many layers of labor beyond the physical actions of making. And, thus, to re-member the being, the person, the human who makes.
As I stitched this piece, I was struck by the waves of emotion, not necessarily related to the Consultant’s stories that passed through me. My work was not simply manual. It was emotive. I wondered in what way those affects might somehow remain in the garment—as some obscure residue? Is there a way to craft (and I use that word intentionally) an object that does create human interaction, a way to relieve us of our consumerist fatigue, by making perceptible both the work of the hand and the work of the heart? Can an object make evident the work of the whole of the laborer?
