I’ve been wanting to try stitching through my painting for a while now. Quite scared, finally found the courage to try it, got the threads, inspired by artist Ghada Amer’s embroidered thoughts paintings, thinking about craft as protest, crocheting as resilience, knitting as ploughing through invisibility. I’m simultaneously listening to the book Chlopki about the generations of polish farmer women and children from late 1800s and early 1900s and the interviews with generations that came after, who now live in Australia or the US, who were able to go to school and become writers, doctors, filmmakers. Yet somehow they’re all trying to find out what the lives of their ancestors look like, and realise how insanely hard those lives were, how watching cows and serving rich naighbours was survival and therefore much more important than education, especially for girls. It makes me think of my great grandmother and how devastated and dissapointed she was, when she found out my mum was pregnant with me at 21. My great grandmother who moved from a village in what’s now part of Belarus, who worked as a milliner and seamstress her entire life to support the education of her 3 siblings. She wanted her 3 daughters to study but wasn’t able to make it happen to 2 of her daughters, my grandmother being one of them. I am realising that my mum being born and growing up in Warsaw, being a cvity girl, was one of the most important goals of my grandma’s life. And the fact that both her and me were not supposed to do anything in the house other than go to school and get the best education possible. The obsession of mothers with their kids having better lives, better future, better education ( in many cases that was around the ability to read and write).
It makes me really sad to listen to those stories, to hear how extreme poverty lead people to live in the harshest conditioins without shoes, without food, to child labor that included watching cattle instead of learning, living in the wild, which as romantic as it sounds, lead mostly to rapes, exhaustion and diseases. Child labour seen by their uneducated parents as the absolute neccesity, letters written to schools to excuse their daughters from learning because they had to be sent to work in order to earn acommodation and food.
I am threading all those life histories together, thinking what I am trying to say…threading feels really hard and tedious but also meditative and relaxing, taking me away for a bit from obsessive need to “work on my website”, “panic about research paper”, “plan more exhibits and apply for open calls”
What’s important?