09/12/2024
ODE TO YARN/OMA
157 x 134
Color red,yellow and blue + PINK!
3 years ago, my grandmother passed away. Last year, she would have turned 100 years old. The world changed immensely during her life. She was a remarkable, independent, intelligent woman with a strong interest in politics and a great longing to work and learn. However she unfortunately could not continue school after turning 13 unlike her brothers (despite getting a scholarship for it from the school) but had to start working to earn money for her family, which always kept very painful for her. Later she decided she wanted to be independent and work and therefor to be unmarried. Unplanned, she got pregnant at 38. Being raised and working in a Catholic environment, she had to give up the child after it was born and was only able to get it back after she got married in front of the church 1.5 years later (pretending that man was the father of her child). And of course, had to stop working, which was an obvious consequence of marriage at that time.
She even had three more children after that but struggled in her role as a mother, which could be very frustrating for her and the children. However, during her entire life, she kept making things herself with tremendous energy. She made all her own clothes, knotted carpets, made dolls, belts, embroidered, sewed, crocheted, knitted, and upholstered furniture. At age 96, she would still make a new dress for herself or crochet a sweater for my daughter. Of course, all this was not seen as work but just as simple female homespun.
When she passed away, I inherited the contents of her so-called “hobbykamer”: countless boxes filled with yarns, threads, and bobbins.
When I was working Tilburg , the city my grandma lived in for a great part of her life, I decided to weave this tapestry for her as an ode to her. But also as an ode to these undervalued handmade textile crafts of making something from fiber to yarn and from yarn to cloth. I think with losing this generation, we are also losing a lot of knowledge on how to mend our own clothing, how textile things are made, and how much labor, material and time they actually cost to make.
