Media: Sewing, arpilleras, story cloth, embroidery
Population: adolescents with depressive disorders
“My goal in life is to take up as much space as a white man”
This quote comes from a participant in an eight-part workshop for Asian American non-males that I took part in a few years ago at the Asian Arts Initiative. As an Asian woman, I’ve been devalued, invalidated, belittled, and trained to take up the least amount of space possible for a very long time. I enjoyed this workshop because I felt so heard and seen in a way that I haven’t been for so long. Embroidering this quote and bringing it to life in a way felt liberating in a way, and having to stab a piece of fabric a few hundred times to do so was certainly a perk. Yi (2020) discusses feeling like she had to explore life with a disability alone before discovering the disability activist community and realizing that she had been missing a community of people with shared experiences. While this piece is not about disability, I can relate to that statement as well as her using craft as a way to explore, reveal, and share hidden issues
I would be interested in embroidery with adolescents with depressive disorders. Similarly to crocheting, sewing and crocheting are activities that I personally find solace in and I would hope that they could find something similar within the process as well. Narrative textiles often start as personal statements and later evolve into important statements (Garlock, 2020) and I can imagine this population could sew an affirmation, a goal, something that someone has said to them, etc, to similarly “bring it to life” in a different way. It helps to see words that you have meticulously created echoing back at you from your wall everyday. Additionally, an embroidered piece could be made into a functional object like a pouch or sewn onto something else such as a jacket or backpack to give it more meaning and visibility.
References
Garlock, L.R. (2020). Alone in the desert: Making sense of the senseless through story cloths. In L. Leone. Craft in art therapy: Diverse approaches of the transformative power of craft materials and methods (pp. 190-203). New York, New York, Routledge.
Yi, C.S. (2020). Demystifying the individualistic approach to self-care: Sewing as a metaphorical process for documenting relational and communal care in disability culture. In L. Leone. Craft in art therapy: Diverse approaches of the transformative power of craft materials and methods (pp. 72-89). New York, New York, Routledge.