CLOSE READING – EMOTIONAL TEXTILES

Emotional Textiles: An Introduction
Alice Dolan & Sally Holloway

CLOSE READING – EMOTIONAL TEXTILES
 

NOTES 

• Exploring emotive properties of textiles – Northwest Europe, 17th century to early 20th century 
• First detailed report studying link between materials and emotions – “– from the metallic lace adorning christening robes, to union cloth burial clothes.” 
• “Keywords: emotions, affect, material culture, gender, life-cycle, making, craft” 
• “Emotional Objects: Touching Emotions in Europe 1600-1900″ at “Institute of Historical Research, London, in October 2013.” = influenced this study 
• Fabric and feeling 
• Explored “methods that can be utilized to uncover the emotional histories of objects made from a broad range of materials, from carbolic soap and glass beads to engraved coins and locks of hair. The 12 panels explored death and memorialization, love, faith, and emotional spaces from freemasons’ lodges to orchards.” linking different types of ways fabrics and materials can be manipulated, changed, altered, distorted, woven, blended etc. in order to evoke a different understanding of what the texture/style is representing emotionally. 
• “The 12 panels explored death and memorialization, love, faith, and emotional spaces from freemasons’ lodges to orchards” 
• The influence that inanimate objects can have/ exploring personal and cultural identity as well as historical references and development 
• ““Quilts 1700–2010” (2010) and “Wedding Dresses 1775–2014” (2014–2015) at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and “Threads of Feeling” at the Foundling Museum (2010–2011).” 
• “do textiles possess greater emotional potency than other materials, or are textile researchers more attuned to emotional meanings within their work?” = argued by the artist’s intentions, their desire to work on a piece, what they want to represent to their audience, time and effort (which is subjective), process and sourcing, references and connections to their own emotions. 
• Texture on the skin and the implications/connotations of that physical touch translating to an emotive response 
• Keynote lecture by John Styles = focused on tokens – left from hospital= scraps of fabric/brought my mother/carers, = if mothers were in a place to reclaim their infants these tokens were identifiers. 
• “Items such as Proust’s famous madeleine in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu can emote at one point but not another”  
• “what can objects tell us about the history of emotions?” 
• “How can historians read the “material language” of objects to recapture their emotional meanings?” 
• The links between sentiments/texture/textiles was not explored in too much depth prior to this 
• “objects remain conspicuous by their absence in Jan Plamper’s (2015: 294–296) list of future sources for the study of emotions by historians” 
• Conspicuous=clearly visible 
• “material objects such as christening garments and grave textiles provide a wealth of opportunities for reconstructing material vocabularies of emotion” = emotional significance, sentiment and meaning subconsciously brought along with the idea of a gift or something handed down generations, or something to signify a culture = links to wealth, protection, tradition, expensive materials and rarity which can influence the response of the person who engages with the item. 
• “material manifestations of particular emotions such as love” 
• Emotional meanings of textiles linked to the process – such as textiles having connotations of women’s domestic work = holding a lot of context regarding the history of graft and women creating to survive or creating for a reason that is deeply important to them = for an income, children’s clothes or something sentimental like bedding / cushions etc. = personal. 
• “Women were and are memorialized through the products of their needles and spindles, whether plain sewing or elaborately embroidered bed curtains” 
• Lots of energy and labor going into these techniques and process for an important outcome. – time consuming, skills admiration, comfort 
• The life of the person who owned a piece of clothing before someone else, hand me downs and generations, sharing clothes n materials, the rips and rough textures symbolizing- or literally representing wear, tear and the fact that someone has lived and experienced things in these clothes.  
• Comfort of having something from when you’re younger, such as a baby blanket or a toy. 
• “Furthermore, the ability of clothing to retain the shape of previous owners can evoke the physical presence of long dead bodies.” 
• Artifacts – taking readings from them, different interpretations as well as factual evidence you can get from found objects and what they can tell you about a period of time, a person, a feeling, an historical event etc. from either observation but also touch and analysing the material/processes/wear and tear etc. 
• “archaeologist Sarah Tarlow attests that her empathetic reactions to the study of burials directly influenced her research questions. However, she cautions that our emotions cannot be used to understand emotional experiences across time or space, although they can provide personal insight into the complexity of feelings that motivated past actions” 
• “Why should historians not keep a kind of fieldwork diary about their emotions during archival work?” – Plamper 
• ^ This is an interesting point, as you cannot ask someone at the time what they were thinking because the time has passed, and the object is the only thing you have as reference of what you are researching – historians have knowledge and context of the era of what they are researching and their opinions of the emotive responses of the artefacts they are investigating could prove to be of use – or at least provide context/more complex opinions of certain situations. 
• “In turn, Tarlow (1999: 30–35) states that nearly every human experience is mediated by emotion, therefore the past cannot be understood without its consideration.” – This quote really resonates with me as I agree, human experience, and in this context, the process of constructing and object using materials is done to create something which would in turn effect an emotion along the way. 
• “Robinson likewise characterizes the historian’s work as a “powerful affective experience,” describing the thrill of chasing up evidence and pleasure of finding treasures in the archives” 
• “the potential of objects to elicit particular emotions does not end one or even 100 years after their creation. As objects move across time periods and regions, they still retain the power to move us” – opinions are ever-changing and therefore the meaning of these objects/archives etc. Could develop, become more positive or negative considering the research that has developed over time- if new things are found out then this could change the meaning etc. As well as the fact that emotions change after a while, if people remember certain things or new links are drawn to an artifact then this could change the way we view something. 
• “The sources studied here include extant objects, paintings, letters, diaries, conduct literature, newspapers, and parish records.” 
• “rare glimpses of the emotional histories of neglected social groups, such as the yeoman farmers studied by Antonia Brodie, or poor Londoners analyzed by Hilary Davidson.” – allows a voice to be heard from underrepresented groups- or more information to be found out about a period of time/group of people that have previously been kept in the shadows/overlooked within a historical context = resulting in withholding evidence or less factual pieces of information. 
• “The authors utilize a range of disciplinary approaches, including archaeology, anthropology, art history, and genealogy, in addition to histories of emotions, dress, and gender. These disciplines offer different starting points, methods and lead to differing lines of enquiry, yet the goal is the same, to investigate why people have emotional responses to objects, how these meanings were created, and how they can be extracted from things themselves.” 
• Archaeology – “the study of human history and prehistory through the excavation of sites and the analysis of artefacts and other physical remains.” 
• Anthropology – “the study of human societies and cultures and their development.” 
• Genealogy – “a line of descent traced continuously from an ancestor.” 
• ^ Therefore the quote above explains how the context of something as well as the development of how people evolve, materials and processes change, and cultural differences between the present and the past can influence different questions to explore and a range of possible outcomes which are unique to what is being discussed and investigated. 
• “Sally Holloway (2016) has suggested focusing on particular revealing moments such as the creation, exchange, and display of textiles, considering the clues provided by symbols, colors and materials” – symbolism through colours has significant cultural history to it, different colours can mean luck, wealth, protection, positivity, hierarchy etc., materials can also have the same connotations, especially of wealth- more expensive fabrics for people who can afford it leading to their appearance reflecting the attitudes and reactions of their persona- all through the textiles used within their clothing. 
• “Moreover, scholars such as Oliver Harris and Tim Flohr Sørensen (2010) have created new linguistic frameworks to structure their analysis. Their effort to interpret Neolithic emotions using archaeological sites was structured around a quadripartite framework considering “emotion,” “affective fields,” “attunement,” and “atmosphere”.” – another example of situations reflecting the context and reactions to certain artifacts/objects. 
• “The issue begins with the process of accessioning an object into a museum,” 
• Accessioning – “record the addition of (a new item) to a library, museum, or other collection.” 
• “Bridget Long develops the theme of emotional crafting in the domestic environment by using diaries to consider the pleasures and consolations provided by sewing for women in eighteenth-century England” Interesting topic to discuss as sewing could have been emotionally draining and labor extensive with negative emotive connotations attached to it, relating to the forceful act of having women do this type of work by habit, rather than out of love contrasted with the idea of women looking after their own selves and children and therefore sewing builds up impressive technical skills which could result in it becoming a rewarding outlet as a hobby. 
• “Anna Schram Vejlby explores artistic representations of middle-class women knitting in portraiture of the Danish Golden Age, emphasizing the power of crafting in embodying romantic and maternal love.” 
• “She demonstrates how emotional value can be extrapolated in the absence of textual sources by analyzing how mothers utilized the color red, silver coins, and metallic threads as magical strategies to protect their infants.”  
• Extrapolated – “extend the application of (a method or conclusion) to an unknown situation by assuming that existing trends will continue, or similar methods will be applicable.” 
• ^ Above quote explains how traditions can cause security and comfort in a process as well as having an outcome that is known and expected and could be built upon throughout the years as skills and methods change and improve. 
• Magical strategies providing more spiritual trust into how powerful an object/material can be in the eyes of someone else. 
• “end of the life cycle to uncover histories of dignity, pride, fear, disgust, and grief” 
• Raising new queries regarding the personal implications of objects within Hilary Davidson’s research into “nineteenth-century burial textiles and the affective power that the surviving scraps have over her as an individual and scholar” 
• “flammable “gossamer” fabrics elicited wonder in nineteenth-century visitors to the ballet, which could quickly turn to horror if tutus were set alight by gas lamps” – juxtaposition between a positive outcome and something extremely traumatizing and damaging. Further enhances the idea of the fragility of fabrics, expanding on ideas regarding their lifespan and the waste that can occur with said objects/materials/textiles = development of chemically flameproofed garments / building on the construction of technical fabrics, adding new meaning and context behind the materials- protective. 
• “Threads connecting these articles include gender, memory, faith, and rituals of the life cycle” 
• “Women were frequently tasked with preserving a family’s memories, with large-scale textile projects such as quilts conveying memories across generations “ – the idea of freezing a moment in time using textiles is something I had not thought about much previously, as this is something I would usually associate with photography/film therefore bringing new emotive meanings to the function of textile creation and using them as artifacts to tell us about a particular moment in time in a way that a photograph cannot. – Bringing me to the idea of textures as an underrated sense/ underrated way of being able to connect a feeling to how something feels/how it was made etc.