Knit One, Purl One ‘Down Under': The Fabric of Theory and Practice as Cultural Performance of Gender amongst Textile Artists in Australia

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Textile arts and crafts, practiced at the everyday level of cultural life, at once assign women an explicit and acknowledged place in visual arts practice and, despite feminist and post-structuralist critique, continue to occupy a muted space in much of today’s theoretical and public discourse on the arts. In this paper, I explore the continuing tensions between feminisms, femininities and fabrics in arts theory and practice, from the vantage point of Australian women artists who intentionally utilise cloth and fibres in processes of aesthetic communication. Based on ethnographic research and visual data, and the use of cultural biography, I bring to life understandings about ways in which women -who vary according to time, cultural background, place and experience – engage with their medium and its materiality in a quest to claim a ‘text-ile’ of their own in personal and public ways. Particular attention is given to experiential knowledge in arts practice, the demarcations between the beginning and end of ‘everyday’ practice, and the politics of knowledge claims within artistic validation, production and dialogue. Attention to women’s processes of textile thinking and making, rather than material objects alone, brings complexity and subjectivity to arts theory, alongside the performative nature of gender in visual communication over time.

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Martien van Zuilen (BA Hons) is a 3rd year PhD student at the University of Western Australia. Her thesis is an ethnographic study into creative textile practices as cultural performances of gender in contemporary Australia. As an anthropologist and a practicing textile artisan with a deep understanding of creative textile practices, she has exhibited internationally, written for magazines, taught and lectured, and is once ‘self’ and ‘other’ in her current ethnographic research. Her research interests are in women and material culture, the visual arts, and in visualising and engendering anthropology.