Crafting Animation: Hermína Týrlová’s Fuzzy Modernism
A fresh look at Hermína Týrlová, the mother of Czech animation, once the winner of many awards who isn’t well-remembered outside her country.
1
Dearest MAI Readers,
As 2021 draws to an end, we bring you our special issue on Feminist Craft. Much has been written lately about the exclusive and exclusionary status of so-called artistic canons. However, less has been said about the reappraisal of women’s craft as an art form. At MAI, it seems to us that the evident ‘purposiveness’ of much of what has been traditionally deemed as the direct product of ‘women’s work’ has occluded careful consideration of its status as art. In this light, Kant’s dictum that art is that beautiful thing which evinces ‘purposiveness without a purpose’ and which can only be calmly appraised via a disinterested appeal to universality seems resolutely patriarchal.
Exploring the relationship female practitioners have with their work, our authors show that craft practice, whether in the professional realm or as a hobby, is not only functional. It often becomes an essential source of leisure, liberating income or aesthetic pleasure. Quietly it resists those patriarchal claims to universality and frequently helps redefine women’s sense of ‘otherness’. In other words, female craftwork is often a smaller-scale, localised or domestic production that empowers communities and individuals.
The articles and interviews included within this issue recognise women’s craft as an art form that foregrounds creativity as a fundamental act of reparation, care, love, and gratitude. To craft, for many of the artists interviewed here, is primarily an ethical gesture that renders palpable the physical connection between the artist and their artefact, between our inner mental states and materiality, between the self and gendered identity. Craft, as an art form, is reconceived as a subversive and potentially political tool that opens up sites of contestation that demand we also rethink the very terms by which we consider notions such as art, the canon, the space of exhibition, and the role of the artist (as an always implicitly gendered subject). Moreover, many of these discussions propel ethical considerations of the materiality of ‘art making’, our deeper connections to the natural world, and the detrimental impact we are having on it. For us, this issue elucidates manifold ways in which women’s craft can be read as an art form: whether as explicitly feminist or engaging with theories of new materialism, ecology, hapticity and phenomenology.
To commission, select and prepare these winter readings for you, we worked with a brilliant guest editor and a craftswoman herself, Isabelle McNeill from the University of Cambridge. We are incredibly grateful for her input and the many hours of labour she spent on this issue. Similarly, we’d like to thank our in-house editor, Houman Sadri, who helped us edit many copies of these articles. Most of all, we thank our authors for sharing their experiences and analyses of craft practices from the western culture and beyond.
We realise that this year has continued to be very challenging for many of us, so we wish you not only a happy, healthy and restful festive season, whether you are celebrating or not, but also a brighter 2022. Here in the Northern hemisphere, the Winter Solstice is approaching—a time of the year that reminds us that the days will eventually grow longer and that we must create, holding light within the dark. So hold on! Create and appreciate the craft around you—perhaps the best available remedy for the darkness, particularly now, when the pandemic feels like some never-ending global nightmare.
Let our authors inspire your activities on those dark and cold evenings. Happy reading and happy making!
With solidarity and gratitude,
Anna Backman Rogers & Anna Misiak.
(Gothenburg, Sweden & Falmouth, UK)
A fresh look at Hermína Týrlová, the mother of Czech animation, once the winner of many awards who isn’t well-remembered outside her country.
1
Artist Hannah Waldron talks about how she became a weaver, her artistic inspirations, creation and temporality.
2
The black female body continues to be subject to various disruptions. Using mixed media on barkcloth, the artist graphically reflects on them.
3
Greenwood shares how she developed a sustainable citation practice rooted in honouring the interwoven nature of text, flesh, and materiality.
4
Women from KRAFT, a Swedish, sustainable handicraft collective, reflect on working in a field that tends to be female-dominated.
5
Elkins theorises the intimacy of (text)iles as an embodied assemblage of queer connection and feminist resistance.
6
MAI meets Anne Sommerin Simonnæs from the National Museum in Oslo to honour and celebrate the legacy of Frida Hansen, the Norwegian mother of creative weaving.
7
Inspired by Hodes’ papercut, Westley invites the artist to contribute to her reflection on the crafting of works that are classified as ‘art’.
8
Drawing on écriture feminine, Dormor discusses how knowledge gained through a textile practice might be expressed using language and imagery.
9
On behalf of MAI, Ulfsdotter meets ceramic artist Annika Svensson to discuss the context of her career as a craftwoman.
10
In the early years Spare Rib magazine used craft to construct womanhood through agentic, creative choices in handmade production.
11
Appropriating imagery from soft-core pornography to create ‘embroidered paintings’ Ghada Amer asks whether craft can be pornographic.
12
Two authors explore craft as an embodied practice situating Scottish knitting as an asset that binds ‘tacit wisdom’ and gender narratives.
13
Raisa Kabir’s latest craft practice project forms a creative response to the realities of displaced South Asian weavers.
14
Artist Hanna Norrna discusses her working methods, materiality, and her participation in the creative community.
15
Using various case studies, this article explores the importance of craft for queer-feminist survival and worldmaking.
16
To reveal the continuity in craft from modernism to the present, the authors show how the legacy of Bauhaus informs their own exhibition.
17
Exploring craft as storytelling and a force for transformation, Marr creates embroidered dusters to challenge domestic gender expectations.
18
Haywood weaves a feminist love song to her wyrde kinde from grief, embracing poetic communities through time and space.
19
Sarah-Joy’s patchwork quilt re-imagines anecdotes and symbols from the Papers of Vera (Jack) Holme held at The Women’s Library Archives.
20
A meditation on the scrapbook Shirley Jackson used to store the hostile letters from readers of her infamous short-story ‘The Lottery’.
21
Introducing ProQuote Films, Yvonne de Andrés rationalises the on-going need to campaign for equality & diversity in the film industry.
22
Fatma 75, the first feature film directed by a Tunisian woman, intertwines histories of feminism and anti-colonial resistance.
23
Sadri reviews a new study of the parallels between newspaper comic strips created by and featuring women, and the feminist movement in the US.
24
Casini’s important new ethnographic study of MRI work and its human and non-human effects, reviewed by Geistė Marija Kinčinaitytė.
25
Neela Bhattacharya Saxena immerses herself in Usha Akella’s newly published powerful volume of feminist poetry.
26
The team of MAI supporters and contributors is always expanding. We’re honoured to have a specialist collective of editors, whose enthusiasm & talent gave birth to MAI.
However, to turn our MAI dream into reality, we also relied on assistance from high-quality experts in web design, development and photography. Here we’d like to acknowledge their hard work and commitment to the feminist cause. Our feminist ‘thank you’ goes to:
Dots+Circles – a digital agency determined to make a difference, who’ve designed and built our MAI website. Their continuous support became a digital catalyst to our idealistic project.
Guy Martin – an award-winning and widely published British photographer who’s kindly agreed to share his images with our readers
Chandler Jernigan – a talented young American photographer whose portraits hugely enriched the visuals of MAI website
Matt Gillespie – a gifted professional British photographer who with no hesitation gave us permission to use some of his work
Julia Carbonell – an emerging Spanish photographer whose sharp outlook at contemporary women grasped our feminist attention
Ana Pedreira – a self-taught Portuguese photographer whose imagery from women protests beams with feminist aura
And other photographers whose images have been reproduced here: Cezanne Ali, Les Anderson, Mike Wilson, Annie Spratt, Cristian Newman, Peter Hershey