The aim for the project was to produce a wall hanging for Wirral Methodist Housing using donated clothing with several tenants from the organization contributing to the creation of the piece. I decided that as the funding was coming from a housing association that a house would be a great communal theme to work on. At the same time as working on this project, I was also teaching a project with kids from 8 to 15 creating a Time Machine based on H.G. Wells' Time Machine.
Detail of Alison Bailey Smith's Rag Rugging Project
We have used a hessian backing and two different rag rugging techniques to create bricks to combine together into a house. I learned the rag rugging technique in the week before from the internet, from books , from advice from an old college friend and my second in-command fellow Oxton Artist, Janine Suggett, (we exhibit once a year in the Williamson Art Gallery, Birkenhead, North West of England). The idea of having individual bricks was to allow the women to work at their own speed, take the work away from the workshops to work on at home or to use a different technique, it also allowed the ladies to work without straining their backs or eyes. Many of these ladies remembered making rugs with rags after the war. Most of the ladies have picked up the technique easily, some had previously created rag rugs in slightly different methods and seem to enjoy the opportunity to do it again. Some with arthritis found it hard to keep it up for awhile, so tea offered a welcome break.
I think the main benefits of the workshops were being able to sit together as a group talking and working on a collective project, providing health benefits - both mental and physical. Many of them have re-arranged plans to be there, as well as taking work away to be completed at home, contributing extra “bricks” in knitting and rag rugging.
Detail of Alison Bailey Smith's Rag Rugging Project
The concept of the house for the hanging was already vaguely in place prior to them arriving, it developed as we have discussed it to in-corporate other techniques than rag rugging, slightly faster techniques done at home. We also incorporated some of the donated clothing as appliqué (flowers from the wedding dress, some fabric as curtains), I later incorporated images of the ladies working on the piece into the wall hanging. During the workshop, one of the participants donated a fabric tape measure. I used it along with a tape measure from my Granny's things to edge a primed canvas that we put behind the door and all the participants later signed it. It was wonderful to combine everyone's memories from the clothes - political t-shirts, ties from weddings, hats from holidays, fabric from first homes etc.
Detail of Alison Bailey Smith's Rag Rugging Project
The group created everything we needed for the hanging to come together during the workshops but it took 3 more days of work to create it into the wall hanging. There were many components that needed to be attached to the backing and needed some creative thinking to get it to all work together, next time I would limit the colour palette available . The extra work was done at my house with lots of help from Janine Suggett, Cathy Warren, Sylvia Davie and Briget. Using many of my own resources at home, thread, fabric, printable canvas, sewing machine etc. Perhaps next time we could do it over 2 weeks, one to create the parts and the second to pull it together. As well as feeling very moved by all the ladies and their enthuisiasm, I also was very touched by being able to use many of my Granny's sewing things. She died in March and I asked my Dad if I could have her fabric and sewing things, she made many of her own clothes as many women did of her generation and took real care in looking after every scrap of fabric. I hope she would be proud of our project.
Alison Bailey Smith
Her work has spanned almost 2 decades and three different countries since leaving Edinburgh College of Art in 1990. The motivation behind Alison’s work comes from being the child of post war parents, Scottish thriftiness and an avid watcher of Blue Peter! Her need to re-use, re-develop and re-create can be seen in her wide use of ordinary materials with extra-ordinary results.
Although her training was initially in Jewellery and silver-smithing, she has crossed over successfully into the world of textiles, costume and fashion – evident in her numerous awards (Scottish Fashion Designer of the Year, Recycling Fashion Designer of the Year and various awards for Fibre in North America and Australasia).
Alison’s staple ingredient in her work is wire that she reclaims from old televisions, the older the better. She has found over a hundred different colours and hues of copper and aluminium wire. Lately though, due to the rate of development in technology, she is finding it harder to find the old television sets and has had to resort to buying various colours of wire! There is always a high component of re-used materials in her work - whether it is re-using charity shop finds or sweetie wrappers to get the right colour. She has become increasingly aware of how wasteful our society is becoming and has started working with plastic packaging with a range of "Junk Jewellery".
Visit Alison's website, blog, and her great collection of photos on Flickr!
From time to time, I buy a bunch of Banjara patches from a woman in India. Wild, gaudy, and bright, they are among my favorite indigenous textiles. I love the shisha mirrors, coins, and use of color. Coveted by belly dancers as costume decorations, the patches are also great to use as accents on other accessories like pillows, bags, hats and larger textiles. My interest in an object, style or technique often leads me to dig deeper into the origin. Who made this? What is the cultural context? How is it used? What materials enrich this piece? With indigenous textiles, the story often has a dark side, one of abuse that can point to cultural annihilation. Such is the case with the extended family of the Banjara: the Roma (commonly known as gypsies throughout the world although they find that name pejorative).
The Romani people have long been associated with the Banjara as their languages and customs have similar roots. Yet, only since DNA analysis has become available has their connection been accepted as fact within the academic community. The Banjara have in their oral tradition stories of how part of their people left over one thousand years ago, never to come back. Most historians believe that the diaspora was spread initially through military contracts and then later continued as their descendants continued to move east, on into Europe and then to the New World.
Both the Banjara and the Roma have resisted assimilation into their dominant host societies. Marriage outside of the clan is discouraged and both retain similar dress codes and mores. Although the Roma have largely converted to Christianity, especially Roman Catholicism, in Europe, they have sincretized old beliefs into new ones.
I had read about the connection between the Banjara and the Roma in the past and knew I wanted to write a post about it for this blog. As always, the information is larger and more disturbing than I expected at the outset. The Roma have been persecuted wherever they have been for centuries. Most people know that they were also exterminated during the holocaust, but I was shocked at the numbers. The accepted guess is between 220,000-500,000 although some believe that the number was in the millions. Orders by the Nazis were to shoot them on sight, so who knows how many actually perished... (Roma People) More shocking to me was reading about forced sterilization of women without their consent in Europe as recent as 2005. The United Nations reported in 2000:
"It is a well-known fact that whenever the human rights of a group are trampled upon, the children and women bear the brunt of such abuse. They become, in fact, the victims of double discrimination. There have unfortunately been reports from Roma NGOs of sexual violence and also of forced sterilization suffered by Roma women. Moreover, there is information that young Roma women are lured or forced into prostitution, ending up as subjects of international trafficking. Particular attention should therefore be paid to their situation and national strategies in favour of the Roma should include a specific action plan for women." Roma People states that much of this is done through State policies: "In Communist Eastern Europe, Roma experienced assimilation schemes and restrictions of cultural freedom. The Romany language and Romani music were banned from public performance in Bulgaria. In Czechoslovakia, they were labeled a "socially degraded stratum," and Roma women were sterilized as part of a state policy to reduce their population. This policy was implemented with large financial incentives, threats of denying future welfare payments, with misinformation, or after administering drugs (Silverman 1995; Helsinki Watch 1991). An official inquiry from the Czech Republic, resulting in a report (December 2005), concluded that the Communist authorities had practiced an assimilation policy towards Roma, which "included efforts by social services to control the birth rate in the Romani community" and that "the problem of sexual sterilization carried out in the Czech Republic, either with improper motivation or illegally, exists."
The following video is a news report about some of the conditions Roma face in Europe today:
This is all so depressing! When I read and see things like this, I just cannot stomach the kind of world we live in! Yet, part of the reason the Roma are so persecuted is that they also play into the stereotypes that surround them: being filthy, procreating like rabbits, stealing, lying, using the system to have an easier life, etc. I worked in social service in a very poor area in Chicago and have always lived in urban neighborhoods where there are obvious extremes of poverty and wealth. The question always comes down to the chicken and the egg, which came first? Do the Roma exhibit "in-your-face" behavior because of how they are treated or are they treated the way they are because of their "in-your-face" behavior?
I believe that there are people who cannot and refuse to live in the systems which we have created and labeled as "civil". AND, these people include many artists I know! Somehow they survive, but they are always on the fringes, living a bare existence, drinking and smoking too much, mooching off of others when they can, unable to cope with responsibility, but also adding an interesting twist to what we perceive as reality. I'm somewhere between the tamed and the dregs. But, most of us have choices that the Roma, Banjara and others of nomadic traditions do not. In order to fit in, they have to deny the very core of their identity.
If I may speak for the American subconscious of the Roma stereotype, we are not as aggressive as the Europeans. Probably because we have more land, more diversity, and a bad record for how we have treated other minorities such as the Native Americans, Blacks and Chinese who were either here first or helped build this country. Oh, let's not forget the Mexicans!
We see the Roma, still referred to by the media as gypsies here, as romantic but dangerous, mysterious but unreliable, sexy but scary.... we love the music, the dance, the freedom, but only if it is at arm's length. Johnny Depp in "The Man Who Cried" embodies this perfectly. He oozes sex, is close to his horse, watches everything from a distance, signs his name with an X, and has absolutely no power. We want him, we envy him, but we don't want to be him.
Johnny Depp in "The Man Who Cried"
One of the most interesting Roma personalities for me is that of Sir Richard Burton, not the actor, but the British spy from the late 1800's. I read one of his biographies several years ago and was transfixed! Supposedly, he had Gypsy blood and was thus dark in features. Because of that, he easily assimilated into many different ethnic groups and was sent as a spy by the East India Company, then went on assignment for the Royal Geographical Society (one goal was to find the source of the Nile River), and has such credited translations to his name as the The Book of One Thousand Nights and A Night and the Kama Sutra! Burton was gifted with the ability to learn languages easily, slept with local women wherever he went, was one of the first Westerners to document the woman's perspective on many issues in Central and South Asia (this all while he was married to a controlling English woman!), and felt so strongly about the remedial properties of good sex that he translated and printed the Kama Sutra in his own basement, subversively, of course, in Victorian England. He later became a devout Muslim and was the first Westerner to enter Mecca (in disguise, but unnoticed).
And, the female gypsy is even more alluring and scary. She is controlling, powerful and has control of magical powers. Don't get her mad at you! Our portrayal of the gypsy woman has always been one of romanticism. She knows all and has no heart.
I didn't find any such dark references to the Banjara. Instead, they are recognized mostly for their music, dance and needlework. Interestingly enough, the Banjara and Roma have recognized each other as "family" and speak out together on issues concerning both of them. They have had several joint festivals and their leadership meets regularly. (See Banjara Times)
What to do with an untamed people? The latest strategy proposed for saving endangered large mammals around the globe, oh, this does include insects and birds, involves setting up safe corridors where they are likely to migrate. Would this be the solution for nomadic humans, too? Perhaps corridors between state and national parks where the untamed can roam free? This is a big issue for those of us who love tribal and indigenous textiles, where wool is the material and sheep are its provider. If nomads with their sheep cannot roam, they can no longer produce the material or the lifestyle which grants us such beautiful gifts.
Whatever the solution, my focus is in the arts and it is my hope that both the Banjara and the Romani will find at least part of their voice expressed through their artistic talent. In 2008 theNew York Timesreported a dismal show given in Bucharest where the Romani were given space in a show at the National Gallery. The report stated that the Romani make up 10% of Hungary's population but suffer 80% unemployment. They described the show more as a flea market than as an up-scale art exhibit. Yet, one important fact was noted in that the Hungarian Guard, a Hungarian right-wing extremist group known for its attacks on the Romani, left the exhibit alone. A small victory?
I often wonder what I would do, how I would be, if I were one of the persecuted. I know that I am a coward at heart, so I could never be one of those French resistance women who biked along with a loaf of bread in their basket, secrets hid in their bras... But, I can see myself as angry and bitter, ready to lash out at those who have mistreated me for so long. I have dogs. I love them and they respond. I see other dogs in the neighborhood who are tied, day in and day out, and they still seem so willing to please, so hopeful for love. Would I be like that? I think not. I think I would be foaming at the mouth, ready to bite, even as I, the coward, peed in my pants.
In the end, we need to find a balance where both the wild and the tame are protected. There has to be room for all of us and it must be in the context of nonviolence and human rights. Maybe some of us have a problem with the "wild", the uneducated, with those who lack an understanding of boundaries and private property. Then, I believe, it begins with us treating them how we would like to be treated. You know.... the Golden Rule.
Hmm...I get that alot. I guess I'm not your usual crocheter (In the classic sense). I mean, I'm 22, I have piercings in places I shouldn't, too many tattoos and I listen to music that has lyrics that makes old ladies toes curl. Then again, I have a floral bedspread, I own at least one piece of pink clothing (shocking I know) and I don't feel the need to hurt small children.
Crocheting has always been there for me, fiber arts in general have always been a part of my life. My mum taught me how to cross-stitch and sew when I was very young. I never liked following patterns so I always just made my own up. When I was about 6 my grandma taught me how to crochet and I never stopped !
I feel lost if I don`t have at least one ball of wool and a hook with me at all times. I used to wear enourmous hoodies (in my goth days), but I`d stash a ball of yarn in the front pocket and walk round town crocheting !
Obviously I began with the usual, granny squares, granny squares and more granny squares (Yawn !). But I never got taught any more stitches, so I've kind of had to make my own way in crochet. By trial and error I've finally found my style, and it's...well...very me ^_^.
Much as I love the traditional view of crochet, I'm trying to find my own way, and bring my own style to my items. Which is where the mohawk hat grew from, basically, it's something I would wear! (and do).
I intend to carry on in this vein and increase my collection of punky crochet and make fiber arts appeal to members of society that maybe it wouldn't have done before, at least that's the hope !
Don't hug a hoody, give them a hook !
Talli not only crochets, but does photography and graphic design. This girl is going to go a long way! Here is where you can find her:
Detail of Alison Bailey Smith's Rag Rugging Project
Assembling Alison Bailey Smith's Rag Rugging Project
Detail of Alison Bailey Smith's Rag Rugging Project
Detail of Alison Bailey Smith's Rag Rugging Project
