to: Craft > #02 - Dear World’s Largest Ball of Twine
The World’s Largest Ball of Twine was constructed by Francis A. Johnson between 1950 and 1979; the ball currently resides inside a custom-made gazebo on Main Street in Darwin, Minnesota. Photograph taken by Joni Van Bockel on April 18th, 2021.
Dear World’s Largest Ball of Twine
Joni Van Bockel
April 18, 2021
Dear World’s Largest Ball of Twine,
I’ve been thinking about you. I’ve been thinking about how every bit of cord that makes up your mass had to run through someone’s farm-labor worn hands, the same way every inch of yarn in every skein I make runs through my fingers. You see, I am a spinner, I make yarn. I’ve been thinking about how string marks time. Did you know that “lineage” and “line” come from the word linen? Textiles have often been used to measure our lives, with metaphors like “folds” and “wrinkles in time,” and the “quilt of life.” You illustrate a considerable amount of time in a man’s life, 29 years of gathering and winding and wrapping. You are a physical manifestation of that time, the weight of it. Time this year has felt heavy. So I spin. I spin to create a marker of my own time, hoping these string meditations will transform this year into something new, something light, something lovely.
With warmth and admiration,
Joni
P.S. I like you better than the giant spoon.
Biography
Joni Van Bockel
She/Her/Hers
written by Colleen Ramsay Hoesch
In this program we are expanding the definition of craft, including studio craft, sloppy craft, amateur craft, and craft activism. Joni and her partner bought their first house, a one-hundred-year-old Craftsman bungalow, during our winter semester. For Joni, this program prompted her to think about the house as a hand-crafted object. Joni has come to think about how to care for her house, her hand-crafted object, with its original wood kitchen cabinets, wood trim, wood sills, and wood floors, all requiring a specific type of care and a specific type of oil finish. The care of a home becomes a type of self-care, a responsibility to the home to respect its age and to assure it thrives for its next occupants, human and nonhuman.
In this program Joni is exploring craft created by humans and nonhumans, including the barn spider, which spins a new web every evening to replace the one it consumed during the day, like a knitter unraveling yesterday’s stitches. She is exploring spinning by learning how to spin. She is researching the history of spinning, including spinning in fairytales and spinning as labor. Joni’s grandmother was a spinner; for her, spinning became a memory of war and loss. For Joni, spinning is meditative and lovely. For Joni, who grew up in rural central California, tending a garden is also meditative and lovely. She plans to give half of her backyard to a patch of Cucurbita maxima, the pink pumpkin, a fairytale of a pumpkin, a nonhuman crafted object.