Sabrina Gschwandtner’s work explores the significance of hand-crafted things. Her 2006 article A Brief History of String, for instance, shows the social, political, or cultural meanings that even a material as unassuming as string can carry when manipulated by hand—it can be tied to mark the borders of a space for religious observance; it can be twisted and stretched into shapes around fingers, elbows, and toes as a form of divination; it can be knotted to act as a means for recording information. Her work shows that all hand-crafted things are rich with significance if we pay enough attention.But none of Gschwandtner’s work makes this argument as elegantly as her series of film quilts, a selection of which is included in the alt_quilts show at New York City’s American Folk Art Museum until January 5th. For this series, Gschwandtner creates quilts using 16mm film taken from Feminist documentaries recently released from the collection of the Fashion Institute of Technology. She cuts short strips and sews them together (she literally sews them—using thread) in patterns and designs that she explains are “derived from popular American quilt motifs including log cabin squares, octagonal stars, and "string quilts," wherein long, thin fabric scraps left over from other projects are cut and sewn together.” The resulting pieces are bold, colorful, and clever in the way they ask us to consider the humble quilt.
Film Board of Canada, 2010.
16 mm film, polyamide thread, 13 x 13 inches
Sunshine and Shadow,
2012.16 mm film, polyamide thread, 22 x 22 inches (framed in wood with LED lights and a dimmer).She accomplishes this partially by drawing our attention to the content of the films she uses to construct the quilts. The film strips, which are taken from documentaries that she explains as “focused on textile crafts such as crocheting, knitting, sewing, fabric dyeing, and quilting, and celebrat[ing] the women who made them,” are meant to be displayed on light boxes or hung in front of windows. As a result, visitors can examine snippets of narrative from these documentaries, little pieces of story that illuminate the deeper social and political significance of hand-crafting as an act and as an idea. In other words, Gschwandtner makes hand-crafted items that actively tell us about hand-crafting.
Camouflage, 2012.
16 mm film, polyamide thread, lithography ink. 69.5×45 inches. Photo by Matt Suib, Greenhouse Media.
via Bomb MagazineShe takes this effect a step further with Camouflage, a quilt designed using visual patterns that represent the content of the film strips from which it is made. In an interview, Gschwandtner explained that the piece was constructed from two films: the first a misleading happy portrait of workers at the Bradford Dyeing association, a supplier of camouflage to the U.S. military with “a record of labor law abuses and environmental pollution;” and the second an educational film called Shadows, Shadows Everywhere, “which teaches children how shadows are made.” Since both of the films represent forms of concealment—hiding a person with camouflage, hiding the truth about abuses to present a positive portrait, concealing a thing from light in the shadows—Gschwandtner explains that she constructed the quilt “out of log cabin squares that are sewn together to make alternating peaks of light and dark, which look like beams of sunlight making shadows.” Just as the films tell us stories about hand-crafting, the crafted thing itself helps us to understand the political and social themes in the films.What’s more is that, by tying media and handcraft together in these pieces so closely that it is difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins, Gschwandtner’s work ultimately asks a provocative question: how much of a difference is there, anyway?For more of Gschwandtner’s inventive quilts, you can visit her website here.
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16 mm film, polyamide thread, 13 x 13 inches
2012.16 mm film, polyamide thread, 22 x 22 inches (framed in wood with LED lights and a dimmer).She accomplishes this partially by drawing our attention to the content of the films she uses to construct the quilts. The film strips, which are taken from documentaries that she explains as “focused on textile crafts such as crocheting, knitting, sewing, fabric dyeing, and quilting, and celebrat[ing] the women who made them,” are meant to be displayed on light boxes or hung in front of windows. As a result, visitors can examine snippets of narrative from these documentaries, little pieces of story that illuminate the deeper social and political significance of hand-crafting as an act and as an idea. In other words, Gschwandtner makes hand-crafted items that actively tell us about hand-crafting.
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16 mm film, polyamide thread, lithography ink. 69.5×45 inches. Photo by Matt Suib, Greenhouse Media.
via Bomb MagazineShe takes this effect a step further with Camouflage, a quilt designed using visual patterns that represent the content of the film strips from which it is made. In an interview, Gschwandtner explained that the piece was constructed from two films: the first a misleading happy portrait of workers at the Bradford Dyeing association, a supplier of camouflage to the U.S. military with “a record of labor law abuses and environmental pollution;” and the second an educational film called Shadows, Shadows Everywhere, “which teaches children how shadows are made.” Since both of the films represent forms of concealment—hiding a person with camouflage, hiding the truth about abuses to present a positive portrait, concealing a thing from light in the shadows—Gschwandtner explains that she constructed the quilt “out of log cabin squares that are sewn together to make alternating peaks of light and dark, which look like beams of sunlight making shadows.” Just as the films tell us stories about hand-crafting, the crafted thing itself helps us to understand the political and social themes in the films.What’s more is that, by tying media and handcraft together in these pieces so closely that it is difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins, Gschwandtner’s work ultimately asks a provocative question: how much of a difference is there, anyway?For more of Gschwandtner’s inventive quilts, you can visit her website here.