They Said Everything They Couldn't Say
And You Fell Silent
>> at the Krišjānis Barons Museum
It was in textiles known as wall coverings (falvédők) that I first discovered the domestic relations of the home, which is the first place we learn to take root, and the different forms of language that evoke and inscribe how one is supposed to live. These wall-protecting textiles spread from Germany to Hungary to the different countries of Europe and the Americas; they are safeguards intended to protect the surfaces of kitchen walls from unwanted stains, soot, and oil.
Caught between the era’s ideological perspectives and its two wars, this practice of needlework offers a written and pictorial history of the elements that shaped domestic gender roles and the duties and behaviours of women. At the same time, needlework and embroidery were seen as leisure activities that occupied women’s desires and aspirations, forging a shared language and memory, relayed between a grandmother, mother, and daughter.
With sentences like “My greatest happiness and my greatest joy is my silent domestic life” or “She who loves her master cooks well for him” that speak on behalf of women to remind them of their daily responsibilities, these textiles convey these women’s intentions about staying together, coming apart, and falling into disorder. As such, they can be read as personal and collective archives that shine a light into domestic life during the era.
The series They said everything they couldn’t say and you fell silent focuses on the multi-vocal, multi-gendered forms and life-sustaining strategies of plants, which remind us that we are not masters of nature but part of it.
Wild plants displace familiar orders, ideas, and roots; might their modes of resistance serve as guardians to remind human kind of models of behaviour that it has forgotten? These textiles from my family represent the memory of the domestic; as I stitched them, I drew inspiration from the characteristics of invasive plants like Forget-menots, Paulownia, and Artemis Vulgaris, which overtake and transform what belongs to human kind.