to: Craft > postcard #01 - Darning as Repair
Darning as Repair
Amy Meissner
Darning as a repair technique has been used for centuries all over the world. This practice of care and prolonging fills a hole in a textile with a new woven space, with visible or invisible outcomes determined by material choice, skill, and intention.
Directions
1. Pre-puncture the holes with a needle.
2. Thread the needle with an arm’s length of yarn. Knot the end.
3. Stitch into the card at hole 1, emerge from hole 2, stitch into 3, and so on. At the last number, knot and cut the yarn.
4. With a new knotted length, stitch into hole A and follow the letters in the same manner, weaving over and under the stitches spanning the numbered holes. Alternating over and under with each pass will weave the yarns together in the center. Knot and cut the yarn.
5. Mail to someone who might benefit from a mend.
Contextualization
The act of repair is one of generosity and future-mindedness, not only for the object being repaired, but also for the human recipient of this care, whether repair is done for the self or for another. Teaching someone else how to repair is equally generous and works to seed the craft of repair within a throwaway culture. The inspiration for this card comes from historic illustrated instruction manuals. I chose in this case to relay instructions via a practiced on and altered object, which when sent to another becomes a gift, an invitation to learn, and an act of care.
Further readings
Karjevsky, Gilly, Rosario Talevi, and Sascia Bailer, eds. “Letters to Joan.” In New Alphabet School #4 Caring, 38–111. Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, M.1 kuratiere der Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung and Soft Agency, 2020. https://newalphabetschool.hkw.de/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Letters-to-Joan-CARING-edited-by_BAILER-KARJEVSKY-TALEVI.pdf.
The project features informal correspondence between feminist scholar Joan Tronto and various artists, writers, and academics. The letters address the current state of care, from the personal to the planetary, and propose questions, answers, and possibilities for care as a democratic paradigm. I was drawn to the epistolary form of this project, which provided an intimate space to discuss and critique care, but also provided evidence of caregiving between senders and receivers of mail during a global pandemic.
Pym, Celia. “Mending and Anatomy: Making Your Hands Knowledgeable.” Utopian Studies 28, no. 3 (2017): 562–575.
Pym recounts her 2014 Parallel Practices residency, “Mending and Anatomy,” in the department of developmental neurobiology at King’s College London, where she repaired medical students’ clothing while they studied anatomy. Her residency drew upon parallels between holes in garments as evidence of use by the body and the haptic experience of textile mending alongside work on cadavers—a common ground between care and working with one’s hands. Because body dissection requires depersonalizing and desensitizing, Pym sought to repersonalize the space by caring for students’ and faculty’s belongings while they cared for bodies. As an artist, I was excited about a craft residency that focused on care for community, objects, and bodies, while providing the craftsperson an opportunity to research practice, materials, processes, and the emotional quality of repair.
Tronto, Joan C. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York and London: Routledge, 1993.
Tronto identifies phases of care along with their moral dimensions, which when applied represent relationships and responsibility rather than autonomy and contractual obligations to others. To discuss care is to raise questions about power, since politics often assigns care to disenfranchised members of the community—enslaved people, servants, lower-class workers, women––which devalues and marginalizes caregiving. My research on the craft of repair has hinged on Tronto’s theoretical structures of care, which has enabled me to understand the practice of repair as an act of care. This allows for various approaches to the process of repair with regards to value, gender, and marginalization.
Biography
Amy Meissner
She/Her/Hers
Written By Heather K. Powers
Alaska artist Amy Meissner entered the MA Craft Studies program intent on bridging literal distance between herself and other thinkers and makers while connecting theoretical constructs to her own textile-based practice. After 20 years of living in the North, Amy is familiar with her embodied response to nature, the seasonal swings of daylight and darkness, and the wide fluctuation of temperatures. A vulnerable and threatened environment influences her definition of “place-based” materials, particularly items that arrive in a place and become stuck or are expensive to remove, such as garments, shipping containers, or plastic waste. This affects her approach to the craft of repair, particularly how and why objects are mended. A frugal, sustainable, and accessible consideration of material and tool selection is always present in her personal work and social practice teaching mending. No fancy imported needles, just reaching for what is at hand.