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Creating social fabric

Project brings out quilting qualities

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For Thinking Rock, the non-profit community-arts organization founded by Robin Sutherland and Miranda Bouchard, the social fabric isn’t just a figure of speech.

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Bouchard, acting artistic director of Thinking Rock, recently invited people to Thessalon Library to participate in creating an actual piece of social fabric. It’s a quilt, featuring images designed and executed by people who may not have ever thought of themselves as artists, or as textile artists.

The top of the quilt, in white and green, is decorated with block-printed images done by residents of Algoma. The back of the quilt is a fabric commercially printed with line drawings of houses, waiting to be coloured in with fabric markers.

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Not in the mood for colouring? There are other ways to make your mark in this communal textile project. Maybe you’d prefer to draw a picture of some bit of Algoma that is important to you – your home, a favourite lake, whatever comes to mind. Then that drawing serves as a pattern for a felt square that will be part of another quilt. A basket of unfinished squares designed by participants in earlier workshops offers the opportunity to jump straight into stitching a square together. All the materials and tools – felt, embroidery thread and wool, needles and scissors – are there; just add imagination and a little hand-sewing. Unfinished squares go back into the basket; if the designer can’t make it to another workshop, someone else will use the picture “map” to finish the square.

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These picture squares were inspired by a South American textile art form, the arpillera. Arpillera (pronounced ar-pee-air-a) are pictures created in fabric. They were first done by Chilean women and sent out of the country as a way of telling what conditions were like under a repressive regime. They were not written or publicly broadcast, so they slipped under the political radar. They were just textile squares with pictures, but incredibly significant. Now many arpilleras depict more peaceful scenes.

It’s not just about the quilts. One of the purposes of this project, as with Thinking Rock’s previous project, Gigidoowak Ziibiik/The Rivers Speak, is to bring people together to share ideas and skills, and by so doing to build relationships and understanding.

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The Social Fabric project is a way to explore and incorporate a variety of textile- and land-based approaches to making art. The handwork techniques applied to it originated both with settlers and the First Nations. Some of them are common to both groups, and some unique to one or the other, but all of them are part of Algoma’s heritage. By fostering the use of these techniques, Thinking Rock is also an instrument for handing on this knowledge to new practitioners.

Handwork with textiles is slower-paced than machine work. Furthermore, the small, repetitive motions of such things as sewing, knitting, crochet and embroidery release tiny amounts of serotonin in the brain, creating a peaceful, often almost meditative state. This slower, more mindful approach, with the emphasis on creation rather than production, creates a closer relationship between the maker and the work.

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The concept of “social fabric” could also be reversed to “fabric social.” From quilting bees to spinners’ and knitters’ guilds, textile artists have traditionally gathered in groups to work, to share techniques and designs and knowledge, food and talk.

A mixed group of adults and children immersed themselves in that social and fabric relationship. Several of the adults indulged themselves with colouring the backing fabric. The quilt was assembled later that week, sandwiched with a layer of batting between the top and the hand-coloured backing, and stitched together.

In the meantime, most of the younger participants produced drawings to be used as patterns for a felt square, and then cut felt pieces to make their drawing into a piece of textile art. Themes ranged from rainbows to mountains. The emphasis is not on producing perfection, but on making something which is authentic and personal – one’s own vision of a special place, done in one’s own hand.

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“You have to stop being afraid of making mistakes,” Bouchard said.

She was always nearby with just the right question or suggestion to help transfer the drawing to fabric, showing one person how to do a blanket stitch and another how felt could be gently curved and stretched to achieve exactly the right curve for a rainbow.

A few weeks ago Bouchard took this project to the arts management program at the Scarborough, Ont., campus of the University of Toronto. Some of the incomplete squares came from that afternoon, including one done by a young woman from China, who created a geometric scene of her home city. Her pattern – Bouchard calls it a map – is clipped to the unfinished square to serve as a guide for anyone who wants to work on it. Any design could be conceived and started by one person, but continued and finished by others, adding a second layer to the “social fabric” theme.

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Bouchard recently took the Social Fabric workshop to the Wharncliffe Community Hall for what she calls a “crafternoon.” A smaller, but equally enthusiastic, group of artists met to exchange ideas and work on squares and on pieces for a second quilt project. This second quilt is a “jellyroll” quilt, sewn not from squares, but from long strips of fabric. For the second quilt, participants are asked to write or print something along a strip, something about the land or the place where they live. The strips will then be sewn together and sandwiched to make a second quilt. The piece will truly be a “textile” in that it incorporates text into the fabric.

The overall plan is to create one communal textile piece for each of the four years of the project, and then use those pieces to create a larger performance space for some even that has not yet been completely planned. As with  Gigidoowak Ziibiik/The Rivers Speak, the aim is to have a large number of people create the entire project together. Bouchard is hoping to create enough interest in the project to enable her to run weekly “crafternoons” or evenings in various area communities, to allow the maximum participation. The next one is Dec. 10, from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Thessalon Public Library.

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As much fun as this is, there is a sense of the value of the mastery and inheritance of these skills. Thinking Rock is working with First Nations elders and other knowledge keepers to ensure that the conveyance of these traditional skills respects, observes and upholds the cultures that have kept them alive. In a time when many people no longer even make their own clothes, the skills that created thread and cloth seem to be fading from the popular consciousness. The Social Fabric project will honour and celebrate those skills and, with any luck, bring them into the awareness of people who may not have been familiar with them.

Some of us who attended last Tuesday’s social fabric social will be joining later ones to finish what we started, or perhaps to pick up some other fabric artist’s incomplete work, and to add our own hands to it. Thinking Rock is looking for participation from anyone in Algoma who would like to come out and be part of the Social Fabric project.

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