Appropriated Threads:
The Unpicking and Reweaving Imported Textiles
by
Jessica Hemmings
By unpicking her daily work at the loom Homer’s Penelope stalled her impatient suitors, buying both time and empowerment through her nightly ritual of deconstruction. Outside the mythic realm the unravelling of woven cloth may seem a laborious and impractical undertaking. In this paper I intend to explore two historical cases, the Navajo’s of North America and the Ashanti of Africa, in which imported cloth was unpicked and the foreign thread, often silk, incorporated in the weavings of the indigenous people. What information do these examples of visual and cultural cross-pollination represent for us today? What motivates a weaver to deconstruct before reconstruction? And what does such an action, symbolically as well as visually, offer postcolonial theorists today? For those of us familiar with Ruth Scheuing’s pinstripe suits minus the pinstripe, we have seen the powerful symbolism exposed through the removal of a single pick of thread from the woven pattern. To deconstruct is to re-appropriate. Returning to the beginnings of cloth construction the Ashanti and Navajo weavers have left a record of the changing patterns of trade and foreign influence facing their traditional methods of practice. By creatively adapting to the expansionist policies of their time these fabrics literally and symbolically signal the era multiculturalism, documenting the natural instinct to embrace the new whilst continuing production methods consistent with tradition.