The unsettling truths of settling: ghostscapes in domestic textiles
| dc.contributor.author | Waters, S. | |
| dc.date.issued | 2019 | |
| dc.description.abstract | This article focuses upon homes and domestic textile traditions as sites where disavowed settler colonial pasts linger. Through art practice, I dwell upon ancestral home-making traditions to investigate my inherited "genealogical ghostscapes" and to acknowledge how ghosting traditions pass along generationally. In specific art works from my 2017 exhibition, Domestic Arts, I scrutinize domestic matter to reveal how since 1838 family members have recalibrated regions of South Australia with imported rhythms and patterns of home-based labor, including making and maintaining comforting textiles. These familiar materialities become the conduit to recognizing the unsettling truths of settling. Overall, it is the use of time-consuming and repetitive methods, similar to those worked by ancestors on their home-fronts, that has become a means of conjuring an embodied way of understanding my settler colonial ancestry. The transfiguring of settler colonial textile traditions into works of art becomes a collective form of protest that invokes an unsettling strategy of recognition. This truth-telling is directed towards not only the under-scrutinized home-making labors of women, but also the ongoing legacies of whiteness and privilege that continue to deny pasts and continue to have repercussions in Australia today. | |
| dc.identifier.citation | Textile : the Journal of Cloth and Culture, 2019; 17(4):378-390 | |
| dc.identifier.doi | 10.1080/14759756.2019.1639418 | |
| dc.identifier.issn | 1751-8350 | |
| dc.identifier.issn | 1751-8350 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/11541.2/138618 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.publisher | Taylor & Francis | |
| dc.relation.funding | Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship | |
| dc.relation.funding | University of South Australia | |
| dc.rights | Copyright 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group | |
| dc.source.uri | https://doi.org/10.1080/14759756.2019.1639418 | |
| dc.subject | settler colonization | |
| dc.subject | domestic | |
| dc.subject | ghostscapes | |
| dc.subject | textiles | |
| dc.subject | blackwork | |
| dc.subject | repetitive crafting | |
| dc.subject | recognition | |
| dc.subject | truth-telling | |
| dc.title | The unsettling truths of settling: ghostscapes in domestic textiles | |
| dc.type | Journal article | |
| pubs.publication-status | Published | |
| ror.mmsid | 9916302301401831 |