Hand, Machine, Cloth: The [Lost?] Art of Craft

I enter the room and immediately see three women sitting next to a large, well-lit object. The well-lit object is a compilation of fabric and string.

As the final event of Portland’s Textile month, I’m here to see Abbie Miller’s Pulling Threads, in discussion with fellow textile artists Sara Huston, a contemporary of Miller’s at the Pacific Northwest College of Art — and Detroit-based Annica Cuppetelli.

The three came to talk about the often overlooked art of textile craft, the difference between craft and design, and what it means to be making something by hand in a world dominated by machines.

What they do not talk about: the fact that they are all young, married women working on craft through the path of academia. 

Huston, the Applied Craft and Design chair of the program, does touch on the dependency of academia in order to do what she loves, very briefly: “So many students don’t respect history. They just want to learn utility, style. I came to this through my family, the original way…This ‘move fast, break shit’ mentality, for me that’s extremely concerning — if you make fast things, you’ll break everything and there’s nothing left.”

The piece towering above them is made up of red, white, and yellow cotton, originally over 20 feet long before smocking, a process that involves gathering the fabric tightly together so that it appears scrunched.

“It’s not to recognize the labor,” Miller adds, explaining the painstaking process of hand smocking to the audience — “It’s to feel craft in your body, that slowness, the physicality of it.”

Almost ruffled but not quite, and with dramatic emphasis on loose, frayed threads — the sculpture gestures towards a dress design, pointing to Miller’s background in fashion. The overwhelming presence of red, on the other hand, with just a few streaks of yellow ribbon— almost overtly refers to blood, alluding to the fact that Miller recently had a baby.

Miller was commissioned to make the large installation by the architecture firm GMA, who are hosting both the piece and tonight’s discussion. To be more precise, their office suite: located by swipe-access on the third floor of a slickly renovated warehouse in Portland, Oregon.

We embrace our role as community builders, seek out public engagement, and regularly give back through community service…Our work is founded on trust, strengthened through sincere communication, and inspired by daily innovation, reads their statement to the PDX Textile month guide.

The cross-pollination of this arrangement feels exciting, maybe even overdue: an independent artist working amongst an established firm, the juxtaposition of her handicraft literally audible against the hum of typing architects in the room.

But Miller did not talk to the architects.

For ten months, Miller stood in the highly visible middle of an open-floor office, cutting and pulling fabric, and not one person asked her about her work. Nor did she, she admitted, reach out. “It was more uncomfortable for them than for me. It made the work better.”

This silence feels almost ludicrous: while designers drew up the sketches of rooms, Miller was literally filling the one they shared. Despite a fundamental, mutual love of space and response, the coexistence was utterly devoid of discourse.

Indeed: the primary attendants of this lecture are Miller and Huston’s students. Most of whom are also women. There is no one from GMA in attendance.

“Ultimately,” Miller reflects, “The space informs garments. It’s like a response.”

What does it mean, then, that the sculpture is titled Pullling Threads, something that playfully points to mischief, exploration, and unraveling? That a messy, blood-red sculpture hangs under well-chosen lights in an office, and no, you are not allowed to touch it. I asked. Miller’s response was blithe. The hands-off confirmation felt apt, given the stiff context with which it was created.

Pulling Threads does push back on a conventionally made and utilized garment, even a practical use of a sculpture in the decorative and inspirational sense. But it was not made to be engaged with.

“When you have people watching you, it changes things. I did think a lot about fashion.”

To stand in the middle of a room and create is to demand attention — and feels so elemental of textile history; to revere its form, craft must be individual, pedelasted, and insular. To collaborate with those working on programs, machines — would be “counter-craft.”

Like parts of fashion, what Miller was describing seemed largely performative.

And yet: necessary, in a world where attention means respect, and to be a woman sewing is not valued as a practical skill, not financially or artistically the way that architecture is.

So then — to both represent and inspire the messiness and labor, a towering, undeniable blood-red, disassembled cloth. “A rugged deconstruction feels necessary,” Cuppetelli enthused.

And despite the way in which the discussion was engineered, the three women, barely situated above the crowd on elevated chairs — talk about craft in loving terms: a tool that empowered them, as children, this power to create useful things, in terms of design — “criminally ornate” things, in terms of craft.

More importantly the discussion revealed that while considered categorical and marginalized, rather than interdisciplinary and accessible — so much of textile craft did reflect community.

Huston, at work currently restoring an old home outside of Portland, talked about the historical influences of being a home-steader — “an act of resistance in a world built on efficiency and expansion.”

Disregarding the link between craft and design for the utilitarian, Miller felt, in her motherhood, a kind of return to the primitive. “Knowing your own resonance with a material, just feeling it, and moving away from history to see what other places can open up…is how I commit to curiosity.”

Because textile as an object is still largely seen as practical and commodified, the starkness of “feeling a way of moving through cloth” does seem radical; art as textile does still feel unconventional, neither an ornamental painting nor a garment nor a still sculpture.

“I just know that I love the materials…I don’t know what craft is. I’m still learning.”

There is a sincerity in the excitement of the students gathered, the representatives of textile and art institutions that arrived out of genuine support and admiration. This is Portland, afterall, and local art. Who asks for it, makes it, and sees it feels like an old question — it is however, important to recognize that we are still asking. ▣

Pulling Threads is a permanent installation on view at the GMA’s Portland office.

LeftBank Project, GMA Suite

240 N Broadway, GMA Office, Suite 203 Portland, OR 97227