This essay was published in Syphon 8.0, a publication of Modern Fuel Artist Run Centre in Kingston, territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabeg Nations. this is how we can visit is a body of work made of textiles, installation in place, photographs, and this essay. Click here to see all of the images and shorter writing.
photo credit Kristin Pope
And every day, as it dies and light leaks, I think of you.
While I was there at the Icelandic Textile Centre, so far from our home but steeped in familiarity and similarity, I finally responded to you. My call-back found its tender shape in a partner textile to one of yours. I speak back to your hand-woven work. I don’t know how or when you learned to weave, maybe from one of your parents. I don’t know your story, but I know that I learned a lot by spending time together, with you, that way.
I found your weaving in your old home; each piece of the house and the textiles returning to the land – your home long gone. I found your hand-built loom there too, your initials carved deep in the grain. I found pieces, parts, and tools from your life that helped you make it, helped you make other lives, and which helped to make that house a home: your circular, hand crank knitting machine, jars of buttons, kitchen wares, photographs, glasses, a loom, a single, carefully hand-woven curtain. I thought then – a curtain is usually one piece of a pair, just as a person is one piece of a family collective. I looked around in the mould and the dust and the garbage – I unlocked old trunks and pulled open drawers stuck together with paint, opened up old closets and inspected water pipes – but I couldn’t find the other part. I haven’t always been able to find you either. But here, in carefully making a new curtain, to pair together with yours and to be together through time, you reach me and I reach you.
That gesture of weaving, such old movements, of light moving through cloth and space is intergenerational making with a very, very long thread, a thread held softly between space. What you’ve left behind, intentional or not, weaves us together to us. What you’ve left, and what I’ve found, reminds me of who I’m from, it lets me talk to you without words, in untouchable and simultaneously tactile ways. To respond to you in this woven forward way lets me (re)imagine and maybe supply your love forward. I think that you left a fire that was unkindled for a little while. But you left tinder.
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I have wondered this:
What would it have been like if intergenerational love and caring were cultivated in my own family network?
What if my great-great-grandmothers' makings were carefully passed between our family network and we had handmade things and maintained shared practices to know our kin and our place?
What would it be like if the opportunity existed to have loved my blood kin fiercely in day-to-day life?
How different everything might be.
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These are questions I have, and the only way I can get near to answers is through making. But I haven't reached any resolution. And, I guess I don't really have to – I guess that I won’t. The asking, making, and moving is enough for me. Embodying that love, care, and forward passing; that fierce love is enough.
I can’t help but think of my great-great-great grandparents, MJH and her parents, every day – I live across the road from where they lived, I walk past the old stone foundations of their home and buildings every day; I am part of this place and their makings just like them. I think about making and weaving like a time-stamp and a place-map. By making a response-based paired curtain to MJHs woven work, I’m working and weaving to make a circle complete again, or at least partially. Though I didn’t know MJH, she is someone that I come from and one to whom I owe my care and attention.
Making, for me, in any capacity, is a thread wound through my evolving understanding of life. Making with my hands is a footer for experiencing the world and allows for continual, specific, and personal meaning-making and (re)construction. So, necessarily on the way, I must deconstruct and rearrange containers that feel safe but limit me as I make my way through; replacing restrictions caused by lost love with tender conversations and visiting, with soft making and strings, and sometimes with broad movements. Maybe instead of hard walls for containment, I'm working on something more of a membrane or soft tissue that wraps around and through life and practice. Like cloth. Like a shroud. A web through which all things pass, make their impact, leave parts of themselves and take parts of me while they're at it, all for better or worse.
While I’m working, specifically with MJH, I notice my thinking-time to be of intergenerational knowledge, transmission and translation, care, and love – but also negative space, emptiness, and loss. I find myself thinking about putting life pieces together somehow, complete with ‘gaps-and-holes’, just like the way cloth is made. I’m not trying to fill gaps-and-holes, but trying to see them fully. A look toward specific cohesion. The gaps-and-holes in my family sometimes feel like gorges – like impossibilities. Working with my hands helps me understand that they’re not necessarily something to be solved, or even found.
I have a deep respect for work made with hands. When I use my own hands to work and make work in the way that my ancestors have, toward makings for people and places I love, I’m moved beyond respect and into an embodied honour-state. Story and meaning carried in a bundle from person to person (in)directly in place must be an act of love: love for those ancestors, for those future relations, and relations who won’t ever be known; love for place in the world. This action reaches around time-place to action the words "I love you”. This making says “I haven’t forgotten, I won’t”. To make is to materialize potentialities and to touch time. To make, is to architect toward – to imagine and contribute to laneways for unconditional love for us (t)here, just as we are, in a softly revived world.
What we make and then leave behind (for a time anyway) is, in the same breath, how we reach around us and ahead of us, how we stretch behind and above and beside. It’s a deep time entanglement: a plying-together; a coming-to from the before, over and over again.
This textile-talk with MJH feels like somewhat of a beginning but is truthfully, a very small filament in a very large web. That’s the point of intergenerational knowledge, care, and love transmission after all – to engage, to generate more of it, in all directions, in all ways, always. I’m not having children, so I know that this making won’t be transferred directly in that way. But long-view, long lasting yet ephemeral makings have a way of gentle impact beyond the life-span of a/my body. I hope my relations have and make life and works that continue reflecting us back and forth and toward.
I think that I’m holding your hand MJH, and I’m looking forward.