What Does Thread Conduct?
Artist
Poets and artists frequently note the etymological relationship between text and textile, extrapolating therein a theory of linguistic materialism. However, what happens when we begin not from etymology but from the fibrous material experiences of thread? This is an exercise designed to draw participants into the tactile, visual, and temporal worlds of thread, wool, and cloth to investigate what fiber “conducts” and to invite makers to themselves “conduct” fibrous tensions of linguistic thought.
Jayme Collins is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton’s High Meadows Environmental Institute and a member of Blue Lab. Her work on textiles and contemporary poetry can be found in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment and in Jen Bervin: Shift Rotate Reflect, Selected Works (1997-2020). She is at work on a book project about poetry and land stewardship since 1960 and an audio storytelling project called Archival Ecologies.
Jayme Collins
Become acquainted with wool or another fiber: smell it, stretch it, hold it up to the light.
Invitation
Obtain some wool or another fiber. The wool can be raw and unprocessed, minimally processed roving (carded but not spun), or a piece of any spun yarn. It might be something you have on hand. It might be an unravelling garment or piece of fraying cloth. You might try this exercise multiple times: once or more with each of the above. Become acquainted with it: rub it between your fingers, smell it, stretch it, hold it up to the light.
Holding the fiber in your hands, unravel it, pulling apart strand from strand and then hair from hair. Pull it into as small a fiber as you can, over and over, creating a little assemblage of hairs on your lap.
Notice how the fiber takes up space in a new way, the shape of its gaps, the air it holds between its strands, the new ways it takes up space and the new avenues along which it might “conduct” meaning.
Now, using your fingers, put the wool back together. You might spin the strands tightly around one-another to create new strands of different sizes, perhaps even building an unbroken chain of hairs to create a thread. Are there other ways to combine these hairs? What are the processes that let you turn the disparate parts into a whole again? What are your hands doing? Where do you introduce tension?
Drawing on the knowledge you’ve gained, write textile into text. What do your hands need to do to render textile into text? How can you conduct the textures, times, shapes, and processes of textile into language?