mackenziefrere.com WRITING

A gift of handmade cloth resonates with the accumulation of breath, care, and time. These are the
ineffable materials of compassion. In cloth, care becomes tangible, wrapping and enfolding us,
warming and protecting our bodies. The ancient legacy of this utility and its substantial social history
make cloth the most familiar and intimately personal material construction. The development of textile
technology closely parallels our own, with each innovation in structure, equipment, or material
reflected economically in the rise of industrial production, and culturally in terms of methods of social
organization and the fluctuating styles of personal adornment. The handweaving of cloth is essentially
a material practice born of human necessity and aesthetics that, in its mindful application, offers a
compelling conceptual model for sensorial consciousness. In a meditation on the immateriality of
thought, Hannah Arendt wonders whether thought and “other invisible and soundless mental
activities,” are fit to appear at all, “or whether in fact they can never find an adequate home in the
world.”1 Handweaving may provide a non-linguistic, bodily expression to these “invisible and soundless
mental activities,” as the accumulation of hundreds or even thousands of nearly identical movements
of hands and feet in weaving constitutes a gestural thought process, enacted through an interval of
time, imprinting the appearing object (cloth) with the temporal. Thus, cloth woven by hand becomes a
tactile analog of the invisible phenomena of thought and perception.

My work is a response to material beauty and a meditation on the spiritual and emotional resonance of
cloth. In his introduction to Water and Dreams, Gaston Bachelard distinguishes between two types of
imagination present in the natural world and in the mind; the formal and the material. According to
Bachelard, the formal imagination creates unnecessary beauty (that which is born of novelty and
picturesqueness) and the material imagination “aims at producing that which, in being is…eternal.”2 I
have selected the term material beauty as it may describe the beauty inherent in tangible natural
materials like stone, water, and fibres. Additionally, the term suggests another kind of beauty not
unlike Bachelard’s material imagination that “is attracted by the elements of permanency in things.”
Perception of material beauty is an aesthetic memory of moments in which one has experienced
beauty in the natural world, in the eyes of a lover, or even in a work of art. Agnes Martin writes,
“When we see life we call it beauty. It is magnificent — wonderful. We may be looking at the ocean
when we are aware of beauty but it is not the ocean.”3 Martin suggests that beauty is an awareness
in the mind. Beauty is not contained in the object of our vision, but rather it is that which is seen
through it, in our cognition of its presence. This formula presents a classic aesthetic mode for
perception that may be expanded to include the body’s kinesthetic relationship to objects. Our
intimate familiarity with the touch of cloth on our bodies makes the visual experience of a textile
inherently tactile. Structure and visual surface pattern are often well integrated in a woven textile. A
textured surface, for example, may absorb light, affecting the quality of the cloth’s appearance. If we
are able to recognize that a handwoven object’s materiality is intransigently enmeshed with its
appearance, it becomes clear that any perceptual encounter with cloth is not only visual but a
synesthetic experience of its tactile presence.

The tactile presence of cloth is both material (fibres) in its construction and immaterial (emotional,
spiritual, political) in its communicative potential. At its most basic, cloth is an arrangement of fibres
held together by friction. The air between and within fibres determines a cloth’s density. This
perpetually collapsing/expanding space within a textile is materially unique to any other utilitarian or
aesthetic construction. The shape of this space and the relative proportion of air to fibre produce the
particular character of any fabric. The rectangular space between threads in plain weave gives a very
different texture or hand (feeling) to cloth than the rounded, looping, and stretching space of knitted
thread. Air accumulates in cloth as an ephemeral architecture of air — of breath. If fibres are its tactile
body, air is the breath that gives cloth its spiritual and emotional resonance. The gentle conflation of
the immaterial and the material in a handwoven piece of cloth creates (an)other materiality, the (im)
material.

notes
1.        Hannah Arendt, chapter 1, “Appearance,” in The Life of the Mind, p. 23.
2.        Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space, p. xx.
3.        Agnes Martin, Writings, pp. 135-136.