Sampler reading

Stacey Dearing: 

Material culture framework - to read the sampler as discursive text recording life and interests.

Interest is in the sewing, not just the circumstances.  Encode potentially subversive messages, which indicate the female voice.

Meaning of symbols are slippery across time (this refers to the problem with semiotic theory), therefore difficult to establish definitive meaning.

The genre of samplers is formulaic suggesting sampler instructor/instructions knew the significance and passed on to students.

Samplers are a record of life.  Women often worked and composed in a media that was functional rather than fancy.  Therefore many artefacts of women do not survive because they wear out or are discarded after their purpose is fulfilled.

Needlework can reinscribe and resist cultural norms.

Sewing can be a significant culture practice of meaning-making - Maureen Daly Goggins.

Emma Shercliffe, Articulating Stitch, Dec 2014, RCA 

Embodied practice.  Feminist emphasis on raising consciousness.

Ria van der Merwe, Collections create connections: stitching lives of marginalised women on the national memory canvas.  3/7/15 Museum & Curatorship.  South Africa

Museums can deliver positive outcomes such as enhanced self esteem; confidence & creativity; social regeneration; inclusive communities; promoting tolerance, inter community respect and challenging stereotypes.

Inclusion and exclusion - who is part of civil society - and not?  Whose voice is heard?  And not?

Embroidery taught as a 'useful' skill by missionaries

Embroidery projects used to preserve Venda (indigenous community) oral tradition

Andries Botha, 2007, ran Voices of Women project.  Creative methodology as a means of women's memory to be recounted, and held in trust as part of the memory archive of South Africa for future posterity.  3000 cloths and Women's Museum in KwaZulu Natal.

Memory retrieval of women and is made tangible through the production of embroidered and appliqué works of art and personal narrative (Amazwi Abasifanzone)

Made by women and point of multiple intersections.

Exhibiting exposure important for: visitors - for the story of Africa; makers - for community reconstruction, and vernacular interpretation of community history; income for women.

Changing the inequalities not only needs economic empowerment via sales, but also political representation - visibility via community projects.  Community/museum textile projects enable 'previously marginalised women to become part of the recorded narrative and historical process".

Embroideries provide a forum for (women) to articulate concerns they otherwise feel unable to express.

'Story cloths ... the means through which marginalised women can make sense of their lives.'

Irony of western embroidery as a tool of subjection, becoming a voice to speak out.

Leads to:
- Connection and co-operation
- therapy
- storytelling to change attitudes
- address poverty
- indigenous knowledge acknowledged

My samplers aim to tell stories to change attitudes; and aim to acknowledge women's skills, talents and knowledge.

Stalker 2003: 30.  Women's fabric crafts offer an alternative to more confrontational approaches in 'subtle yet strong ways'.

Clover Stalker & McGauley, 2004. Public form for voices of the marginalised.    Transformation from cultural consumer to cultural makers/creators.