Extract
Julia Bryan-Wilson’s Fray: Art and Textile Politics serves as a potent reminder that the centrality of textile—and textile techniques—to creative practice, whether art or design, is not new, nor is it restricted to ‘high’ art and culture. In fact, the book—composed around a series of late twentieth-century case studies—both elucidates and consistently challenges the premise of the separation of high art and amateur craft. The through lines connecting each of Bryan-Wilson’s seemingly disparate case studies include both the commitment to labour and techniques typically performed by socially marginalized people, including women, lesbians and gay men, and domestic pieceworkers, as well as the examination of ‘how things are made, and how such methods are imbricated in wider economies and social movements’ (p. 30). The political of the everyday is explored through techniques such as crochet, sewing, braiding, appliqueing and quilting.
The introduction sets out the conceptual structure of the book, as well as emphasizes the important theoretical frameworks within which textile operates, drawn from post-structuralism, semiotics, art history, and craft theory, among others. Similarly, Bryan-Wilson stresses that she does not seek to create a tidy, synthetic summary of textile practitioners whose work engages social issues, but rather to reconsider the depth and complexity of textile’s connections to the social, cultural, and political. The depth of this exploration is articulated in her explanation of the title, of which she explains the notion of fraying—as well as the weaving back together—of high and low, craft and politics, is the central premise of the book. She notes that textile is inherently fraught with contradiction, being firmly rooted in both the systems of capitalist production and in the fierce and organized resistance to it from historically marginalized populations.
