I recently decided to try out a subscription to Fiberarts. I already subscribe to Quilting Arts, but was interested to see what the difference was. The long awaited first issue arrived this morning with the latest issue of Quilting Arts. I had to read the new one first of course. I don’t usually spend a long time on the readers’ letters, but this one caught my eye.
(…) The work that you publish is gorgeous, some of it wild, and certainly the artists have let their imaginations soar. (…) But we have some problems. Many fiber artists include lots of incompatible materials in their work that look great, but may have a short life; because of this, many museums are afraid to acquire them. Mixed-media work has alway posed problems for conservation, restoration, storage, and exhibition.
Fiberarts should encourage artists to be creative with pure materials and not use synthetics with unknown life expectancy. When a museum raises funds to buy work they want new acquisitions to last without needing constant attention or concern. Textiles from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have lasted this long because of the necessary care and time that went into making them. I challenge needleworkers today to try to duplicate the quality and construction of those designs.
Ita Aber, Riverdale, New York
This confirms a gut feeling that I have. Although I read about all these new materials that people are including in their textile art these days, I have to confess to being somewhat of a purist. I can’t help feeling that it is the easy way out. There is so much potential to add interest and details to surprise and delight the viewer using all the techniques available to us as needlewomen that we really don’t need to be adding all the rubbish we pick up on the street and collect on our shopping trips into our art work.
Is it because we don’t understand the necessity of slowness? As I have quoted more than once on this blog “Gut Ding will Weile haben”. Or as my Mum was always telling me “If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.” Producing quality work takes time. There are no short cuts. We have some exquisite hand embroidery done by Sqeze’s Grandma, and it certainly wasn’t rushed off in an afternoon. The problem is that no-one these days is prepared to pay for the hours it takes to produce lasting, quality goods. Here in Germany one of the largest megastores, Saturn, selling electronic and white goods advertises successfully with the slogan “Geiz ist geil”, which can be roughly translated as stinginess is cool. That about says it all. And this slogan has been around since 2003.
Not that I am particularly aiming to have my textile art included in museum collections, but I would like to think that it was still around to impress my nieces’ and nephew’s children and not rotten and fallen to bits.