Hosted with Yara Chalaan
The workshop was inspired by the deep connection that both Yara and I have with textile practices. They remind us of home, family, and the care and cherish we have for our loved ones. We have both integrated these media into our artistic research and made it our own, embracing mistakes and making them our own. We wished to share the spontaneity that guided us from the beginning of our experimentation with embroidery and crochet and to engage in the act of making and creating in a community setting. We wished to create a sate space where stories could be shared and words could be playtully woven to create collective tictional narratives.
We collected second-hand materials like threads, needles, yarns and tabrics to share and incentivise the participants to be creative - sometimes when things are new, there's the fear of ruining them and we aim to overcome our barrier.
We are encouraged to re-consider mistakes as intuitive gestures of our hands, to follow the natural movements of our body. Details like tangled threads, knots or unconventional stitching techniques can bring a world of curiosity and fascination into the piece, especially when viewed from different perspectives: upside down, folded, or from the backside.
Quoting the publication Entangled - Texts on Textiles (Karlsen, 2024) :
"The mothers recalled that god used to be three women - that time itself is made of threads. And tne perishability of they knew now, in the extreme perishability of the things they had made, that thread can be unwoven, snipped, dyed, repurposed - altered in innumerable ways.