Tender Relations: silk research, 2020

In the period spanning January - May 2020, I investigate silk - an ancient fibre with a vast, known history of commerce and culture. The entry point for me becomes how to learn about this material not as a textilic fibre as it is commonly known, but as a being or creature to whom I can patiently and tenderly relate. I use silk spinning as a vehicle to make this relation, meeting the fibre incrementally and drawing insights that may extend to other materials, creatures, each other and ourselves. Silk spinning becomes a channel for knowing.

At first, I assemble a knowledge base that is practical and intellectual, through material collection, reading, interviews and field visits to the silk mills of Sudbury, UK. I collect silk waste from mills and online providers, thinking I can ‘make something’ with it. 

In my interviews, certain things stick out. I am told by the member of a weaving Naga tribe that she had “cut some ties” to live in modern India. I easily find perspectives of silkworm farmers but not the silkworm. Paternal forms of protectionism seem to abound, less ecological connection. There is widespread acceptance of domestication and breeding practices, and a historical focus on creating and utilising silk products. I notice my own hurry to finish off the research and quickly make something for exhibit.

As the weeks wear on, I slow down. My investigations became concerned with how to collect and record knowledge using the body; this will later grow into an abiding interest in non-intellectual forms of knowledge making. Questions float into view.

1. How do we know something? 

2. When we know about something with the body and not just the mind, does the quality of that knowledge change?

3. Does the thing we are learning about transform - does its value change?

4. What is the implication for how we live?

Core aspects of my knowledge gathering now become necessarily tacit and embodied, primarily through the spinning of silk waste and journaling about the process.

I find that I have no desire to weave or utilise the silk yarns I have spent hours spinning. I regard their production as an incidental, beautiful byproduct of our intimate relation. Touching, pulling, grating, spinning: these are all actions my body takes to know the silk and by proxy, the silkworm. Incomplete and partial, but certainly closer and more satisfying approximations than merely reading or hearing about the labyrinthine history and intellectualising it.

The question crystallises further: what is it to know something and what is knowing in service of? Donna Haraway’s work becomes extremely important - her formulation of knowledge and perspectives as subjective and partial* emboldens me in finding things out - I can now grasp at a language for what I am trying to do. 

Alongside, I collaborate with performer and artist Suhaee Abro to initiate a movement practice that grows organically out of the need to involve my body in research. This becomes a way of meeting my body’s intelligence in a daily fashion, with or without craft tools. We speculate on a more full-bodied, less anthropocentric form of living. 

These tandem bodily explorations initiate an open-ended collaboration that continues to date. For some video outputs and further investigations, see Movement Sketches.

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References

Haraway, Donna, Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective, Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, (1988), pp. 583, JSTOR.