In late 2005 I was commissioned by the Moonee Valley City Council to facilitate the creation of the Moonee Valley Flag. The first stage of the project involved information gathering through a series of community consultations. I interviewed groups as diverse as the African Women's Sewing Group to the Essendon Scouts. As the project brief spoke about textile objects as carriers of material history, I asked the community members to bring along a textile object that was culturally or personally significant to them. The objects that surfaced ranged from Eritrean painted goatskins, through a to a Kiss fan jacket to Tuvalu woven headbands. All objects were photographed with their owners and their stories recorded. The second stage involved bringing together a small core group of community members to design the flag. Using all of the information gathered and maps of the area to form collages, we designed a flag that featured a lyrical map of the area, with textiles motifs as the map marks. The last stage of the project involved myself weaving the tapestry at the Sam Merrifield Library in Moonee Ponds. During this final stage at the loom, I was privileged to meet many more community members and hear their personal stories, in a more informal setting than the community interviews, without the distraction of being recorded to slow their tongues.
Over the long process of weaving the flag I became very interested the dialogues that I was having with the public at the loom and how my performance as a working weaver and community artist facilitated these conversations. With the loom as a stage I was performing on a number of levels. I was performing the importance of the community stories to the city of Moonee Valley. As I wove I would explain the process that I had undergone with community members to come up with the design; as such I became a voice for the community members that I had consulted with, imparting the importance of the textiles objects to them, retelling their stories, affirming their place on the map. The textile object is a universalising form that connected most people who entered the space and I heard many tales of textiles practices 'in the old country', tales of skills being passed on, tales tinged with the loss of old ways, cultural meanings and the waning of use of skills. The responses seemed to fit into two categories- firstly there was a sense of awe for the skills, from those who had little or no experience with making. Secondly, there was the complicit response of having been inside the concentrated space of creation. The responses can be divided by the markers of outside , the position of the viewer and inside , the position of the viewed.
The first type of dialogue often started with "You must have a lot of patience" (to which I would reply something like "it is more of an obsession"). These conversations were mixed with wonder and awe of the process of weaving and the complexity and beauty of the final product. "To begin with we have the wonder of the primal act of creating." I often exaggerate the hand movements the technique requires when people are watching me so that viewers can see how it is done more clearly-this is part of the performance. For this first group of people I become a universalised figure of a maker: dedicated and patient. How does the figure of the weaver at work cut across history and form the connections for the community members? What are the cultural meanings that the figure of the weaver carries? When viewed from the outside, the figure of the weaver is similar to the figure of the needle worker: silent, stoic, dedicated, marking the passage of time with their hand movements. I am performing as a skilled artist, a creator and I am also demystifying the process by allowing the public to be privy to the method of weaving. Quite a few community members were taught the basics of weaving by weaving on the sampler or weaving a pass on the flag. Through this process I re-contextualised the silent and often absent figure of the weaver and reinserted labour and movement into the previously still image.
The second type of conversation takes place inside the space of awe, the space of the creator and often involved confessions of love of technique, complicit remarks that refer to the space that the body creates through movement when making. This space is referred to with reverence: it is a space apart that is treasured and longed for. The difference between the community crafts people and myself is that I am expressing the image of the closed concentrated space of making and at the same time exposing this space by presenting it in a public arena. Does the concentrated space of making take on new meaning when the public are allowed onto the stage? Does it lose meaning or gain extra layers. There is a complex concert at work on the stage of the loom; a performance that touches on the history of textiles, communities, culture and nostalgia, a process that unfolds in a new space that opens up previously closed, intimate areas of making.
Notes
This article is part of a larger project looking at performance and dialogue in community arts and artists working in the public arena.
Luekenhausen H, "Wonder and Despite: Craft and Design in Museum History", in Rowley S (Ed.), Craft and Contemporary Theory , Allen and Unwin, NSW, 1997, p. 30
For an in depth discussion of the figure of the needle worker in genre painting see Blonski A, "Mechanical Toys and Metaphor: the representation of craft and craft makers in the cinema", in Rowley S (Ed.), Craft and Contemporary Theory , Allen and Unwin, NSW, 1997
