Practicing (the) Craft

Tracing a lineage from surrealist myth-making to feminist biotech worldbuilding.

Earlier this week, I attended an online talk hosted by Treadwell’s Books in partnership with the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic—part of the Magic in Contemporary Art series (Ep. 2), featuring Dr. Amy Hale and Professor Susan Aberth in conversation about the esoteric legacy of British-Mexican Surrealist artist, Leonora Carrington.

The Q&A that followed prompted the topics of this post, particularly since Amy generously mentioned my work among a group of contemporary artists, and Susan responded by sharing her interests in the under-examined aspects of Carrington’s practice relative to those of us mentioned. This post is a response to Susan’s prompts, as I reflect on Carrington’s work alongside my own technofeminist praxis of ritualised craft. What follows is a gathering of threads I haven’t picked up for quite a while, but am always happy to re-engage with—here, to follow from Carrington’s hybrid dreamscapes to my own entangled lineage of craft and biotechnological worldbuilding.

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I follow the Instagram account of Leonora Carrington’s estate, managed by her grandson who shares images from across her full repertoire.¹ Carrington’s paintings—which she is best known for—draw me in with their sometimes gauzy, dreamlike figures, tracing across the canvasses as (what appear to be) fine chalk pencil lines. To me, their oblique narratives unfold as interdimensional tissues of presence, overlaid on more vibrant backgrounds.² As Susan Aberth noted during the Q&A, Carrington’s textile works are lesser known, and remain largely unexamined for their magical implications. She expressed an interest in seeing this work, and textiles more broadly, explored with greater depth and seriousness in contemporary discourse around esoteric art. Interestingly, yesterday the Carrington Instagram account posted a photo of one of her paintings titled, “The Spinners” (1997). In the painting, Carrington’s thin, chalky lines become wispy filaments of web, stitched into symbols on the robe of a shrouded central figure.³

As someone whose decades-long witch(craft) practice is deeply grounded in textile technique and metaphor, Carrington’s tapestries, for me, represent a potent convergence of artistic vision and magical practice that I’m interested in examining through my own logic of making. Her imagery is profoundly impactful⁴ but I’m first drawn to the sensuousness of the tactile as an expression of desire (and magic is the conduit for desire). Secondly, for many textile practitioners past and present, mythic and actual—from Penelope, perpetually at her loom weaving and unweaving time to preserve her autonomy, to contemporary ritual stitchers—fibre, filament, and weave operate beyond the task of assembling pattern or imagery. They function as coded spell structures: conduits of intention, activated through repetitive movements that lull the maker into a liminal channel, or a trance of technique through which thoughts and desires are materialized. Other craft mediums engage similar states and logics, but I want to expand on this to connect it directly to my own work, to exemplify how this forms a lineage from craft and magic to technofeminism.

For the past twenty-five years, I’ve developed a practice rooted in textiles, spellwork, and bodily (and biological) ephemera—part of what I consider the expanded textile field. Beyond its concrete techniques, this practice is an active material engagement with relational, interpersonal, and somatic phenomena towards meaning-making. Outside (or perhaps inside) of the quaint whimsy that textile techniques deploy is a primary technology of becoming—a highly personalized system for materializing thoughtforms, whether dream, memory, intention, secret, desire, or story. It is a way of embedding (recording) will into structure and calling form into being through ritualized actions.

Like many women of my generation, I began practicing craft as a small child, taught focus and patience through the medium of stitch. I learned to calibrate myself deeply by moderating time and vision with my fingers, translating sensory input into a tactile, symbolic, and private language while building something soft that I could hold and cherish. This is affect in action—or, meaning-making, creating structures of interiority and expression through the performance of my hands. This is a continuous thread of autotheory that runs throughout my entire practice.⁵

The first textile object I ever made was a baby doll-sized pillowcase, which I embroidered with an animal figure (a jolly pig), when I was just four or five years old. It was remarkably precise, displaying a natural dexterity executed through what might now be labelled as hyperfocus (sometimes called ‘the zone,’ or ‘flow state’). My godmother had shown me how to add surface embellishment to a plain piece of cloth—not for any functional purpose, beyond honing my inner vision into an externalized object (and likely providing her some respite from my incessantly inquisitive nature). Crafting with care became a way of transferring my curiosity into an entranced ritual inquiry. The pillowcase was more than decorative; it was an act of conjuration, stitched in quiet concentration. I consider this something akin to a threshold object, signifying an early lesson in how to align will, image, and material that set the course for much of my creative work to come.

How was it more than just stitch?