Ravel

A Project for Art in Odd Places 2023: Dress, by Deirdre Macleod

From the ground up

Find a space to sit and weave.
At odds, out of place, but in plain sight.
“I’m from the Philippines… This is my mother.”
“That looks really difficult…is it really difficult?”
“…we use machines to weave there, to make very fine cloth.”

Out of the corner of my eye. Standing beside me, looking at his phone. He seems oblivious, amused by something he’s watching. I turn a bit. Try to catch his eye, and he moves.

“…only six days? You should stay here for longer.”
“My mother has eight looms. Can I take a picture for her?”

Smiles. With eyes. Looking down at me at where I’m sitting.

“No, I’m not artistic. I’m an accountant. I came from Kyoto. I worked at Citizensbank. Or, I used to. I’m retired now.”
“Keep going…keep going. You need peace to do that. Lots of peace.”

Watching, watching…walking away just as I look up to make eye contact.

“I’m Gloria. Will you say what you’re doing into my phone so that I can tell my friend? Wait…start now. Say, ‘Hi Brian’…
Yes, I’m local. I live on 9th, at Avenue A. I sell clothes. Here, this is for you. Take it, I won’t charge you. Try this…
Do you believe in God?”

Cool draught of air behind me and a metallic shudder. I’m sitting up against scaffolding outside the Y. Someone’s parked a bike right beside me, the tyre touches my back. I twist a bit to avoid track marks on my skin.

“Oh! You moved. You were so still! I just noticed you out of the corner of my eye when you moved.”

Try to catch his eye, and he moves.

Rain drips and rattles off scaffolding. The loose line of people by the sidewalk edge tenses as the bus pulls in.

“Will you teaching me how to weave? How do you weave? Is it easy? I’m Paco, from Mexico originally. I’ve been here a while now. Oh, I’ve got to run. I swapped my shift with my colleague because it’s my son’s birthday tomorrow and I want to take him out, so I need to go…”

Finding a patch of tree bark to lean my frame against. Its texture is coarse and leathery. At its base, a square of gritty soil. One yellow leaf blown from the branches. Something small, shiny and circular, half-submerged in sand.

“How long does it take to make something like that? What are you making?
“Is it a scarf?
“When will you get it finished? Today…or maybe tomorrow?”

A woman asks me how to get to 15th Street. And I tell her to go right, rather than left at the end of the block. Which is broadly the right direction, I think. I’m surprised she’s chosen to ask me, weaving, shawl-wearing, sitting against a tree as I am. I don’t exactly look local. Perhaps it’s simply because I’m situated and I’m still.

“My friend told me that there was a woman weaving on the corner of 14th Street. I didn’t believe her, so I just had to come and see. I go to Mexico each year and about seven years ago I did a course on frame weaving and I’ve been weaving ever since. I just love it. I’ve been making headbands and selling them.”

Somebody over my shoulder. Can’t see them, but I can feel them there…momentarily. Looking. And then they’re gone.

“I just love that you’re doing this. I don’t know what you’re doing, but I love that you’re doing it. Out on the street! Why not?”

Although the sun is bright on my face, my feet are cold. It’s mild, but the paving stones have a mid-October chill. I flex my toes to warm them and stretch my back.

“…I’m a Doctor, from Saudi Arabia. My Dad encouraged me to start weaving during lockdown and would send me pictures of things to try. I did my residencies in Aberdeen and Dundee. I loved being there…I was surprised that people could understand me…what’s the language that they speak around Aberdeen? Yeah, Doric! No…I don’t think I’d go back to work in the UK, but I’d like to go back to Saudi at some point and to learn more about the weaving that they do there.”

My weaving frame leans against the iron pole of an awning. I avoid the cracks and splits in the concrete sidewalk, trying to find a stable space. By the edge of the road, not far from traffic, I could feel exposed and vulnerable. But, as I find the weft with my fingers, I’m absorbed by the work of making this fabric. Close-up focus on the veil of warps. The elemental city fades for a moment.

“Would you like a square of chocolate? Go on, you need some chocolate. I’ve been handing it out to some of the other artists too.
Have you seen Ed?”

Weaving as observation

Be somewhere. Be in the midst. Draw attention. Avoid attention. Make connections. I can sit and hide in plain sight. In plain site.
On the edges, at street level, from the ground up. To the slow spaces. My heartbeat slows down as I weave. As I catch the warps with my middle fingers and thread between the weft, I can see obliquely, through my fingers, through the warps. The ground, the frame, the yarn. What’s close, what’s distant. The light, the gutter and the air.
Tension, slackness. Weaving reflects my mood and moderates it. It’s something to do with my hands. Soothing…something to hold. To hold on to. To settle into. As I weave, I breathe. Holding both sides of the frame, I feel my feet on the ground, planted, knees below the horizontal of the wooden loom. The warps form whiskery bars. I’m behind them, peering through the frame as if it’s a bird hide, breaching its surface with vision.
I can listen. Appearing to be occupied, elsewhere, but I’m here in my mind, through my ears. Fragments of conversation pass close and drift on, becoming inaudible to me. I’m left with broken threads, a patchy, holey fabric of words and meaning. I can’t hold on to more than wisps. I’m in the midst, but not with.
Weaving on the street is a bit like drawing in the street. Street photography can threaten, because it seems to make a record, to capture souls. Drawing doesn’t threaten in the same way and weaving might seem even less able to imprint anything meaningful. Yet, weaving makes its own record; within the physical material of the textile as it catches the grit and the grain of the streets, but also in my mind, because it’s such a slow and deliberate way to spend time. The weaving absorbs my thoughts, my memories, what I sense as I sit and work. Time, process and journey. Perhaps, then, weaving in the street is a form of deep listening. Deep, embodied listening, because working with my hands makes me aware of how the city meets my skin.

I took Olivia Laing’s book ‘The Lonely City’ to re-read while travelling. I suspected that it would be a good companion as I encountered New York City alone. When I wrote my project proposal, I’d described ‘Ravel’ as being an exploration of the way in which identity is mediated and altered through being in a city over time, but, as I walked and wove, I realised that it was also an exploration of the human need for connection.
I arrived here on my own, with one person that I could call upon if I needed. As I arrived at the Sutphin Boulevard airtrain interchange, I felt my aloneness, that singularity which isn’t isolation or loneliness, or isn’t yet those things. In her opening chapter, Olivia Laing considers when and how her aloneness in New York City became loneliness. She made me think about the role that having no-one to talk to can play in making someone feel lonely. I became aware of looking deeply into the eyes of those that I began to encounter, in grocery stores and coffee shops, partly to make a connection but, also, because at times I could not make myself understood. I sought a visual connection in place of a verbal one. But the verbal mattered too. I arrived in the city with a bad cold and in search of medication and was touched by the pharmacist who said that she hoped that I’d feel better soon. I doubt, though, that she’d remember me.
Weaving let me explore how connections are made. Weaving takes a single thing, a line of yarn, and meshes it into a surface through touch, time and process. Perhaps weaving on the street enables a drawing in of human wefts. An invitation to be curious and to become part of it for a moment.
People did stop and talk to me; I was surprised quite how many and how diverse our conversations were. Was the fact that I was sitting, quietly, appearing to do something almost everyday important too? My project wasn’t obviously performative, although it was, particularly as I walked between blocks with my weaving frame and trailing Harris Tweed. Sitting makes you vulnerable, prone, slow to move. It’s difficult to be a threat, when you are crouched down, encumbered, below eye level.

Futile acts: weaving and unravelling

“What are you weaving?”
Well, I wasn’t really weaving anything.
I suppose I was weaving a surface – a textile – but I wasn’t planning on it being anything and I didn’t imagine that, whatever it was, it would ever be finished. When the man who’d stopped asked me this question, I’d started to unravel the weaving. Picking apart the warps with my middle fingers, feeling a loosening tension in the weft and pulling it through. Quietly and unnoticed, my actions were to unravel, reduce, retrace my woven steps.
“What you’re doing [weaving] is excellent. Your work is excellent.”
“How long does it take to make one of those?”
One of what, I’m not sure, but it must have seemed as if I was making something, even though we hadn’t reached that point in our conversation.
“Are you making a shawl?”
It makes sense, to try to make sense of an act that seems so out of place. I would do that myself. Sense-making tends towards the productive and the output. It’s not inclined itself towards process and journey. But this weaving isn’t meant to have an endpoint. Like traditions of weaving and histories of cities, this weaving will never be complete.
As I wove, I thought about what it means to be productive. Whether unravelling a weaving can be regarded as a productive act. I was careful about to whom I revealed that I was unravelling my weaving. Because it just doesn’t make sense, to be going backwards, to be unnecessarily undoing something that has taken time and effort to do. What does it mean to unravel? Physical and psychological unravelling is never good; it’s regarded as a vulnerable and shameful position. Why would you unravel? Because there is a mistake in the doing means that undoing is the only option.
But what if unravelling isn’t about undoing, about correcting, about weakening or falling apart? What if it’s done as a generative act, as productive in its own right? Can unravelling be about opening something up, making space for, reconsidering, re-shaping?
What happens when you re-trace your steps? Are you unravelling them or just adding to them? Is it possible to unravel your steps?
Even in the unravelling of a weaving, there is accretion. Loosened, dropped yarns pick up grit and the sweat and grease of my hands as I wind it up again. Thoughts, memories, bodily sensations, sounds. The rain on the corrugated scaffolding harder and softer; the buses swinging in to the bus stop swiftly, intermittently and leaving again. The bike parked up so close to my back that I could feel the tyre treads against my skin and then gone, before I noticed. The rhythms of ravelling and unravelling in the city happen all the time as a barely noticed tide.

© Deirdre Macleod 2023

Deirdre Macleod‘s spatial practice combines movement with expanded forms of drawing. A human geographer and contemporary artist, she uses gesture-based performance to understand cities and tell their stories. She has exhibited and performed her work within the UK and Europe and is a Lecturer in Art at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.