Fray: Art and Textile Politics

摘要

Julia Bryan-Wilson's Fray: Art and Textile Politics serves as a potent reminder that the centrality of textile-and textile techniques-to creative practice, whether art or design, is not new, nor is it restricted to 'high' art and culture. In fact, the book-composed around a series of late twentieth-century case studies-both elucidates and consistently challenges the premise of the separation of high art and amateur craft. The through lines connecting each of Bryan-Wilson's seemingly disparate case studies include both the commitment to labour and techniques typically performed by socially marginalized people, including women, lesbians and gay men, and domestic pieceworkers, as well as the examination of 'how things are made, and how such methods are imbricated in wider economies and social movements' (p. 30). The political of the everyday is explored through techniques such as crochet, sewing, braiding, applique-ing and quilting.