Issue #9. Sweary textiles & weaving of a different kind at Greenham
Celebrating the Crone talent of subverting textiles for activism, sisterhood n' mischief. Includes: The Profanity Embroidery Group, the Durham Miners Gala, and weaving at Greenham.
But first…a big Crone welcome to all our new subscribers 🥳 - many of whom came via Mellissa Blease’s piece in The Sheffield Tribune which also announced the launch of our ‘in real life’ meet ups - Crone Club Sheffield. Hello to you all, and a huge thanks to the gang at The Sheffield Tribune for trailblazing a return to ‘slow’, thoughtful and joyful journalism. 💚
This month we say goodbye to Crone Joan McCarthy 🇦🇺 who died last month. She was ‘a passionate advocate for community development’, conducted many a ‘crone crowning’ and inspired women of all ages. Here’s a link to a podcast she did last year for the Social Developers Network in Australia.
This month’s feature is a celebration of the crone subversion of ‘feminine’ art forms deemed ‘acceptable’ by the patriarchy - the world of tapestry, textiles, weaving and embroidery.
As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts and stories on this topic.
Much love and sweary solidarity.
Juzza
xxx
ps to get the most from this issue, you need to see the pictures.
Textiles for activism, sisterhood and mischief.
By Crone-In-Training, Justine Gaubert
I have a story in my head (which may or may not be true), that Jane Austin set up a warning bell to ring when someone opened the door, so that she could put down her pen and pick up her needlepoint instead.
Textiles have long been the polite face of ‘acceptable’ female creativity. Even the progressive Bauhaus movement initially ‘encouraged’ female designers towards textiles. As a worshiper at the altar of all things Bauhaus, I was gutted to discover this, but it did make me doubly chuffed to see this reel from ‘Women Designers Pod’ (Instagram) about the success of Gunta Stolzl, a German textile artist and designer. 👇🏽
Under Gunta’s direction, the ‘Weaving Workshop’ became one of THE most successful faculties of the Bauhaus, and she went on to gain the title of ‘Master’ in 1927 (though sadly was the only woman be given that title).
Still, I’m going to take her success as one in the gonads of the Patriarchy 👊🏽. Which, for some reason, has just reminded me of this rather fabulous piece by a member of the impressively named ‘Profanity Embroidery Group’ @PegWhistable.
Created ‘by accident and totally without a plan’ in 2014 by co-founders Annie Taylor and Wendy Robinson, the Profanity Embroidery Group (PEG) comprises of around 30 regular members, and meets every other week in the Duke of Cumberland pub in Whitstable, UK.
Amongst the group’s back catalogue are ‘crone takes’ on such classics as: ‘Diana The Huntress on the bloody school run’…
…and their first collective artwork - ‘The Quilt of Profanity.’ Admittedly, they say it was difficult to stitch all the mis-sized pieces together, probably on account of so many women having been previously being mislead about what 10 inches looks like. 😳
Textiles for activism
Last month, Crone Kazza (you can check out her fab Substack here) invited us to join them at the 138th (‘it’ll not last’ 😳) Durham Miners Gala. Since 1871, on the second Saturday of July, over 200,000 people pack the streets of Durham to soak in the sights and sounds of ‘The Big Meeting’ - a noisy and jubilant parade of silk, socialist banners and seemingly every brass band from (largely ex) mining villages across the country.
Having gone to school at Dinnington, (a former pit village in South Yorkshire), I’ve always been incredibly moved by a brass band; and as a copywriter, I’m a sucker for a socialist strapline. Add to this that the event took place just a week after Labour saw off the nasty party in the UK General Election 🥳, we weren’t the only ones whose eyes were leaking with renewed hope as the as the tapestries of ‘Need before greed!’ and ‘The past we inherit, the future we build’ flooded past us (literally, it pissed it down).
To top it all, there were Crones in abundance too, including banners by the Barnsley Miner’s Wives Action Group and Sheffield Women Against Pit Closures. Also spotted was Crone Chris Peace, a Sheffield criminal defence solicitor leading the march for the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign (pictured below, far right).
In more recent years, residents in former pit villages are also restoring, or even creating, new banners. Thank you to Naseem from Leeds Women’s Forum for speaking to me about their beautiful tapestry, which took them two years to make.
There were other embroidery projects too, like the one pictured below, run by Crone Barbara Chrisp, Director of CALM in East Durham CIC, and embroidery teacher, @elysebenjamin, where they worked with community groups creating hand-embroidered tapestries to share personal stories of their local history in East Durham.
Best of all, we gained a few new Crone Clubbers - (Crone Andi and Crone Alison hello to you 👋 ) and bumped into some of our Filia sisters too ✊
It’s fair to say that the Gala is a living expression of the Durham miner’s motto - ‘the past we inherit, the future we build’, and as they say on their on their website:
There is nothing like it anywhere else in the world. 🥰
Textiles to build community and sisterhood
The story of women coming together to make things, is, of course, as old as time.
While we were in Durham, we discussed this month’s topic and Kazza sent me this link to the The Unlikely Story of the Folly Cove - the Best Designers You’ve Never Heard Of. Based on the north shore of Massachusetts and led by the children’s author Virginia Lee Burton (AKA ‘Jinnee”), this ‘rag tag group of mostly untrained women created immortal designs’ were ‘united by their desire to fill their lives and their minds with a particular form of well-thought-out beauty.’
Jinnee was convinced that—through practice—anyone could learn design, and put her students through a rigorous artistic process. I love that her training process ‘cycled with the seasons’ (a true Crone thing to do!), and that she ‘steered her students away from lofty or imagined subjects, and encouraged them to find inspiration in everyday Cape life’, embracing the colours of the local place such as the dark green of the seaweed found there.
Weaving webs at Greenham
But it was textiles of a different kind that women activists were creating on Greenham Common in the 1980s.
For almost 20 years, Greenham Common became ‘home to thousands of women acting in political resistance to the nuclear arms race, to patriarchy and violence in all its forms and to the claiming of British common land to store US missiles’ (source, the fabulous website ‘Greenham Women Everywhere’).
Thanks to Dr Pam McKinny, I’m finally making a start on editing some of the wonderful conversations we captured at our Crone Spoken Library at the University of Sheffield’s Festival of the Mind. (We’re hoping to create a ‘Crone Digital Library’ starting with some of those conversations - please do get in touch if you can help us fund this!)
Crone Jill Raymond’s story of her life at Greenham will hopefully be the first one (watch this space!)
Webs and weaving are present on so many of the digital artefacts on the Greenham Women Everywhere website, so of course, I had to find out why!
This led me to the equally fascinating British Arts Studies Journal website (BAS) which explores the symbolism behind the web and the weaving at Greenham.
“Spider webs proliferated at Greenham Common, both in and around the peace camp and circulated as one of its unofficial logos via its visual and material activist culture. The web was deployed as a symbol but was far more than that. The most potent manifestation of Greenham's "material literacy", namely, a knowing, collaborative, and radical experimentation with matter, it was immediately noted and praised by Marina Warner among others. When used on the fence or over protesters in sit-ins and die-ins, untangling the web made surprisingly hard work for the police and military authorities faced with the task of removing it, and reduced them to "the fiddly task of the kind women are traditionally required to do."
Ha! This is brilliant!
The site goes onto say that webs were first used in America by ‘Women's Pentagon Action’, where “webs blocked the entrances to the Pentagon, their making stood for ‘acts of empowerment, defiance and love’, tireless resilience, feminist reclamations of witchcraft, and recognition of spiders as powerful and stealthy but underestimated predators." Having observed that the items often fastened to the perimeter fence by women protestors (such as toys, baby clothes, or even an egg were purposefully incongruous with military might), Guy Brett described the woollen webs as"a brilliant realisation of the weakness-strength metaphor."
You can find out more about Jill’s story of her life at Greenham when it’s released in the Crone Digital Library. But don’t worry, as a beloved subscriber to Tits to the Wind, you’ll be the first to know. 😘
Other links
Check out our contribution to the Crone textile world by visiting the Crone Club shop and investing in ‘The most expensive tea towel you will NEVER need.’ It’s a limited edition artwork, created by Crone-of-Corwen-and-Sheffield, Lyn Hodnett with Justine Gaubert. Frame it. Put it on the wall.
Just don’t dry the fkin dishes.
Can your school find Common Ground?
Common Ground is an opportunity for your school to find out more about the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp and to take inspiration from the thousands of women who stood up for what they believed to consider what causes are important to your learners today. Find out more (opens new link to Greenham Women Everywhere website).
What could a new roadmap for ageing look like?
Age like a feminist! Free online workshop for TTTW subscribers by Crone Club (UK) and the Sage Sisters Society (USA), with @Laura Lightfinch.
Tuesday, 27 August 2024, 19:00 20:30 UK time. Only a couple of places left!
Register at www.croneclub.org/events/newroadmapforageing 😘
Fascinating, as always. Every read makes me glad to be a crone! Thank you x
Thanks for sharing this article, which i missed first time! It was so lovely to meet you and Cazza at the Big Meet. And again at your do in Sheffield. Hopefully see you again soon! Keep up the great work, Crone Andie xx