Textiles Quotes

“When Art struggles, it succeeds; when revelling in its own successes, it as singularly fails.”
― Owen Jones

“I have learned that each and every piece of cloth embodies the spirit, skill, and personal history of an individual weaver. . . . It ties together with an endless thread the emotional life of my people.”
― Nilda Callanaupa Alvarez

“Along the way I kept running across wonderful bits of information about the women - virtually always women - who produced these textiles and about the values that different societies put on the products and their makers. When I talked about my work, people seemed especially eager for these vignettes, stories that told of women's lives thousands of years ago.”
― Elizabeth Wayland Barber, Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times

“But what, I ask, was life really like? What hard evidence do we have for what we might want to know about women's lives? No evidence means no real knowledge.”
― Elizabeth Wayland Barber, Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times

“Of course, being perishable, the textiles themselves are not easy to learn about -- just like most of the rest of women's products (such as food and the recipes for preparing it). Therefore, to recover the reality of women's history, we must develop excellent techniques ... using not just the obvious data but learning to ferret out every helpful detail. Practical experiments like reweaving some of the surviving ancient cloths are a case in point. Among the thousands of archaeologists who have written about pottery or architecture, how many have actually tried to to make a pot or build a building? Precious few; but with so much data available for study in these fields, scholars felt flooded with information already, and such radical steps hardly seemed necessary. Our case is different; we must use every discoverable clue.”
― Elizabeth Wayland Barber, Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times

“. . . fabric was my first consistent contact. . . my first language, my mother tongue—tactile, animate, and entire.”
― Robin Brown, Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir