Close Reading Janis Jefferies

Our Second Year module Contextualising Craft Practice is fast taking shape as a research skills course which explores contexts of contemporary practice but also retains a conscious intention to develop students' skills as researchers and critical thinkers. At first glance this intention may seem an obvious requirement. However, striking an optimum balance between, on the one hand, introducing stimulating content, while on the other, building students' critical skills - is not at all simple. A danger is that critical or "academic" skills can seem a dull and dusty turn-off when there is so much exciting visual territory to explore. However, the strategic acquistion of critical skills is essential to fully appreciate the rich subtlety that goes on in the studio. So, for the last three years, we have been experimenting with methods which embed critical skills without losing touch with the extraordinary range of ideas and practices which now make up contemporary textiles.

Yesterday's session was a successful case in point in which the balance worked! We close read sections of Janis Jefferies [right] Textiles {in Carson and Pajaczkowska (2000) Feminist Visual Culture New York: Routledge}. However, we began by reading some lines included in a review of Seamus Heaney's new collection Human Chain. The intention was to introduce the method of close reading through parts of one of these poems without addressing the context. And we saw how without that context our interpretation of the content tended to be faulty. This led us to Jefferies' chapter.

Within a few paragraphs of that text we were deep into issues which implicated the roles and identities of women as artists/makers, and the hierachical snobbery with which, not so long ago, subjects such as Textiles were treated as "women's work." On film, we followed up Jefferies' references to Judy Chicago [left], Miriam Schapiro and Lucy Lippard, and took a look at the Guerrilla Girls' 2006 symposium at MOMA in which they explained their strategy of challenging the patriarchal control of exhibitions which continue to marginalise women artists. Our discussion was lively; students were surprised to learn that only as recently as the late 1970s and early 1980s had the pioneering work of Chicago, Schapiro, Sherman - among many others - begun to tip the balance.

We discussed how choices of materials and techniques can have political implications into which meanings are already woven; and how these can be deployed reflexively to resist stereotypical responses. The class spoke of how friends and others outside Art and Design still have scant understanding of what Textiles is as a subject; and how they are often patronised or their work misunderstood.

And how might they counter these attitudes, we wondered?

By gaining awareness of the critical debates - such as those posed by Janis Jefferies - which involve the relationship between social indentity (as women, as informed practitioners) and the radical challenge the content of their work might present. We found a marvellous line in an interview with Judy Chicago who, speaking of her influential teaching, said: "From the beginning it was a content-based pedagogical method. Find your content, then select the media that best expresses that content; and if you need to, develop the skills to mistress that medium. This is exactly how I work." In other words, a subject is not defined by it's skills or the materials it uses, but how it expresses content.

It was an enjoyable session so we celebrated with a group picture [top].