In 1992 I proposed this performance/intervention to a scholarly women's study conference. A young academic at the time, I had been out on the scholarly conference circuit for a few years, hoping to define myself as an academic and ultimately secure a tenure-track job. The A*maze*ing Grace Clothing Project proposal was meant to enliven and bring a different kind of interaction to the well-established and complicated conventions of sharing/competition that I felt hovered around young scholars at these academic conferences. It was about intimacy and sharing; doing and making - in the midst of very much talking about ideas.
My proposal was accepted, and I contributed this collective performance in pyschogeography to the Southeastern Women's Studies Annual Conference on March 14, 1992 in Tampa, Florida. It is interesting to see how many of my on-going concerns were voiced here, almost twenty years ago. And how difficult it has been to find mentors or educational environments that are truly transdisciplinary. Sometimes I add this to my resume, and other times not. Was it a curious willful one-off? Or a critical key to where my path was taking me?
I would like to thank the conference Chairs, Janice Snook and Patricia Del Rey, who welcomed this unconventional proposal. Most of all, I want to thank the dozen or so women who came out to participate in this experimental workshop in 1992. Maybe it's time for a second A*maze*ing Grace in 2012? Where/Wear have we been?
Project Description:
While the corridors echo with the muffled strains of conference papers being delivered, The A*MAZE*ING Grace Clothing Project, a kind of conceptual art sewing bee, offers women the chance to collectively practice a Foucault-based deconstruction of the street maps of their childhood. After a brief review of recent art and writing concerned with the metaphor and rhetoric of grids, maps, and mazes, each woman in this workshop can pick up a loaded painted brush and set down on fabric her recollection of a street map that bound her childhood before transforming that labyrinthine maze into her own subjective map of the remembered experiences of girlhood.
The map is chosen to raise questions about the structure of the man-made environment and to reveal the power and knowledge that they encode. What might appear to be a literal, factual document is actually intensely metaphoric and inadequate to account for lived experience. It is an opportunity to view the postwar home's network to larger social units as a labyrinth presided over by women but commanded by men who designed and built the roads and buildings. In this workshop women are not the prize but the navigators of the passage through a labyrinth. Here, women collectively assert the value of their own experience as they develop personally-symbolic patterns from maps and express them aesthetically in the political act of painting fabric, a medium that has been associated with women for centuries. The grid-like appearance of many maps makes the initial pattern some women will lay down on the fabric recall and question the importance bestowed on the grid in formalist theories of 20th-century art, with its privileging of painting on stretched canvas. This recasts the image of the artist away from the implicitly male easel painter toward woman as cultural producer.
While the workshop can end here, my own work with this project continues when I cut up and sew these dual-coded maps to make my own clothing. My return to sewing allows me to make peace with Miss Bachman, teacher of the mandatory and traditional high school sewing classes for girls that were designed to prepare generations of thrifty nurturers to take their appointed place in the home. Certainly it brings me pleasure to think of adult women creating their own symbolic patterns together. Each finding her own iconography unleashed on the grid-stained fabric that can be freely cut up and sewn into clothing that will embrace a woman as she moves through everyday life.
My vision of women helping women affirm each other's diverse -but in may ways collective- experience is one I have wanted to share for two years. This would be the first of what I hope would be a chain of such workshops. I hope to develop a document for The A*MAZE*ING Grace Clothing Project that is packaged in the format of a clothing pattern envelope with instructions inside so that women can take these "patterns" back into their communities and continue the chain, helping one another deconstruct the maps of power.
"Amazing grace, how sweet the sound...
I once was lost but now am found
Once was blind but now I see.."
