The Bounded Text: Material Intertext in Contemporary Fiber Art

Although we commonly associate text with the verbal realm and textiles with the realm of the physical, text is material. Just as textiles are made with fibers and yarns, phrases are composed of letters and words. And when composed in fiber, text becomes physiological, or tangibly sensual. By the same token, fiber itself is a text ripe with aesthetic properties, cultural connotations, denotative meanings, and narrative chronicles. This paper borrows Julia Kristeva’s 1969 concept of the “ideologeme”—the intertextual function that materializes meaning within any text to consider the work of five contemporary fiber artists (Desire in Language, 36).

Danielle Andress, Kathryn Clark, Melissa Cody, Dianna Frid, and Sara Impey combine words and phrases with the tangible materiality of textile to produce interpretations that are both literal and representative, direct and polysemous, visual and verbal. Like written language (letters, words), all visual texts (lines, colors, images) harbor pre-existing discourses, histories, and permutations that are not always obvious at first glance. We must “read between the seams,” so to speak, and connect those lines to on-going social processes. In distinctive ways, these artists are informed by the structure and ordering of words...and threads. They reveal the fundamental connection between verse and fiber that is generally taken for granted and, in doing so, expose the component parts of process, construction, and meaning-making. Particularly the construction of language itself.