Fiber art
[2] Beyond weaving, fiber structures were created through knotting, twining, plaiting, coiling, pleating, lashing, interlacing, and even braiding.
[3] Artists in the United States and Europe explored the qualities of fabric to develop works that could be hung or free standing, "two or three dimensional, flat or volumetric, many stories high or miniature, nonobjective or figurative, and representational or fantasy.
For fiber artists, in addition to long-standing experimentation with materials and techniques, this brought "a new focus on creating work which confronted cultural issues such as: gender feminism; domesticity and the repetitive tasks related to women's work; politics; the social and behavioral sciences; material specific concepts related to fiber's softness, permeability, drapability, and so on.
[citation needed] Prior to the development of weaving and related approaches using twisted strands, fabrics were made from single sheets of material, such as animal skins.
Felting was an invention that allowed for the creation of a textile from fleece that had been sorted, combed, laid out in thin sheets that were then rolled or agitated with other friction until the tiny barbules on the fiber twisted and connected.
[8] In Europe between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries woven pieces called "tapestries" took the place of paintings on walls.
"[7] At the same time period in the Middle East, fiber artists did not make tapestry or wall hanging weavings, but instead created beautifully crafted rugs.
[9] Other fiber art techniques are knitting, rug hooking, felting, braiding or plaiting, macrame, lace making, flocking (texture) and more.
A theme that many retailers employed was to send out the message that sewing not only saved money and let them explore their personal style, but was also a way to be feminine and show gracefulness.
[13] Dr. Deborah Thom, professor at Cambridge University, helps detail out a time where fiber art took a feminist turn during the Suffrage Movement where women were making embroidered banners for their protests.
[15] Chicago created one of the first pieces of "high art" that incorporates and celebrates needlework and fabrics within women's history, called The Dinner Party (1979).
Linda Nochlin In 1971 continue with the feminist movement by publishing her groundbreaking essay Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?
Parker has published books on art history and psychotherapy, and uses theories from both fields in her analysis of "women's work".
[17] Barnett describes that most historical studies of embroidery concentrate on questions of style and technique, where these exhibitions track the idea of femininity that was forced upon women through embroidery from medieval times, when it was considered a high art form practiced by both men and women, to its current denotation as a 'feminine craft'.
[17] As Ann Newdigate states in her essay "Kinda art, sorta tapestry: tapestry as shorthand access to the definitions, languages, institutions, attitudes, hierarchies, ideologies, constructions, classifications, histories, prejudices and other bad habits of the West", there was a shift in textiles after The Subversive Stitch was published.
"Then in 1984 when Rozsika Parker's The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine, focusing on textiles, could not be resisted by even the most conservative of Western practitioners; modernism was finally disrupted in the Low Art sphere.
The empowering implications spread beyond European textile artists and affected curators, teachers, and art administrators in a much wider Western context.
Twenty years after I had taken up art as my vocation, I began to feel the oppositional codes of the separate spheres slowly eroding as I wrote my thesis and investigated the domestication of tapestry from its previous high art status (until about the turn of the century) as a European male practice.Craftivism is the continuation of craft for political purposes by women.
[17] Most recently, craftism and the fiber arts have served as an important channel for the expressive of social protest, an example of which is the women's marches after the election of Donald Trump in 2018 and the pussyhat phenomenon.
While each interview is tailored to the individual artist, Prain always asks, "Do you believe that your gender or social class has any bearing on your attraction to an involvement with needlework?"
In a review of the "Pricked: Extreme Embroidery" exhibit at the Museum of Arts and Design (January–April 2008), Karen Rosenberg notes that the medium has expanded to such a degree that there are many approaches which artists may take to distinguish themselves.
She conjectures that curators intentionally eschewed the word "craft" to instead focus on things like "process" and "materiality" and concentrate on more serious topics.
"In 2013, Canadian artist, Colleen Heslin won national recognition for her piece Almost Young and Wild and Free which was praised for its "fresh approach to a traditional medium" using textiles and craftwork to produce a colourful, abstract canvas of dyed materials.
