Workshop Notes 2/29/24

“You’re holding a little bit of the Mediterranean in you hands. In protected shallows on the Spanish coast, the sun has been working its magic, leaving behind beautiful crystals of unrefined, minimally processed sea salt for more than 100 years. You’re just one shake away from savory perfection.”

This is the ad copy on the side of a store brand coarse sea salt canister. It struck me as completely absurd for a few reasons. First, in its attempt to present you this veneer of pristine nature that you will be imbibing, it completely erases the people and tools used to harvest the salt. Second, it quickly passes over the environmental consequences of the fossil fuels used to ship this salt from Spain to the middle of the land-locked United States. The copy wishes to whisk you away to another world where labor and the consequences of our consumption choices do not exist. Just taste that “savory perfection,” friend. Don’t sweat the small details. Let the sun do all the work maintaining this seemingly endless resource.

It’s all a bit much for this sociologist to handle. I still remember my sociology of power class kicking off with Professor Waters sitting in front of the class with an apple in her hand. She noted to the class, “This apple contains multitudes that you cannot even fathom.” For her, sociology was using analytical tools that strip away those layers to understand everything that makes an apple. An apple wasn’t just a piece of fruit. It was globalized trade; consumer preferences driving changes in seed, fertilizer, and insecticide markets; labor relations between farm owners, growers, and harvesters; and the increasing consolidation of farming operations nationwide. In short, I cannot stand this copy, because it tries to collapse all this reality into a mystified short hand where purchasing this generic sea salt is quasi-spiritual quest for tasting perfection.

I’m not interested in this sort of capitalist mystification. This mystification is something that Henri Lefebvre explains and denounces in vol. 1 of his Critique of Everyday Life. It’s the same sort of capitalist mystification that thinks throwing a pizza party for your employees will solve the unending drudgery and soul-crushing nature of 21st century work. I am interested in laying bare these multitudes and seeing them for what they are. I am interested in making it painstakingly clear how I make textiles, so that folks can understand the labor behind it. We aren’t getting lost in discussion of minimalist decor, aesthetics, and what a textile will allow you to say about yourself. This is all just capitalist noise used to divert attention away from the labor. No, I am all about placing the labor of the craft process front and center, because it’s those processes which mean everything. At the end of the day, I am and will always just be a working stiff trying to find meaning in the machinations of my mind and hands.

This is the shorthand WHY, the TL:DR, behind why I do all the spinning, dyeing, and weaving for my fiber art. Yes, it’s strictly a socialist response to this sort of capitalist mystification. I want to control the means of production and every little nuance of how the textile is created so that there is as minimal harm to the surrounding world as possible. I will never obscure the reality behind the textiles I make. There will never be any confusion on where the Shetland fiber comes from (Dyer’s Wools), how I spin it, what I dye it with, the tools I use to weave, and the magic I imbue the cloth with. I won’t sacrifice my own craft ethics to make more money by shipping the production of designs overseas so I can produce more textiles quicker. I don’t need labor saving technology, because I want to participate in this labor. I want to get lost in it and be part of a centuries old technology that connects me to my most distant hominid ancestors.

This participation piece is key and comes into sharper relief when we consider the response of a tattoo artist who was asked if he used AI art generators to draw his designs.

I want to underscore that this tattoo artists explicitly notes that participating in the art, doing the art is the whole point. It isn’t the drudgery we find in our cubicles, cul-de-sacs, and cars. No, participating in a craft or an artform is an open-ended exploration of what it means to be human. You don’t need to let anything get in the way of that. Don’t let capitalism spook you out of participating in this basic human activity with all its hogwash mystifying language. You don’t need to be producing the equivalent of Spanish Sea Salt Gold to be a participant in a craft or artform that gives your life meaning and joy. Just Do It.

Anyways, riff over. I am still working on Destiny’s piece for our trade for the noble pika warrior on my left leg. Because I love labor, I chose to do 13 color changes in one section twice. Would I do it again? Yes, actually. There is something about working on these tiny sections and seeing them build into a bigger story that I really enjoy. I like the quality of focusing in on a microcosm for it to reveal a larger macro level reality. It’s slow going though. It takes about 10 minutes to do 1 row of this intricate work. And yet, I want to go more detailed and intricate. Here is a detail shot of what the areas of the weaving look like at this point.

It’s sorta wild to do five color changes in four inches, but that’s what we are doing. Here’s a look at all 13 of the color changes at once.

Now just imagine that I start doing complexity like this throughout the whole weaving and break out of my tripart design structure that I have been using for more fiber spells. Anyways, that’s what I am dreaming up anyways. Here’s a look at the whole tapestry at its current state.

Album of the week - The Bug “Fire”

This is the mood over here as we saw over 100K people vote uncommitted in the Michigan democratic primary and Marianne Williamson coming back into the primary race. We even saw every major news outlet wasting their time on the “uncommitted” vote, time that they used to be using to white waste the genocide. Now they are stuck trying to explain away 100k people voting in protest of Biden. We need the darkside riddims of The Bug to bring us to the front lines to see what voting as a “noncommitted delegate” in the Colorado democratic primary can do to pressure the Biden administration to end the genocide in Gaza. Listen specifically to the track “War” with the galvanizing voice of Nazamba and keep the fight up to end the genocide. Rest in Power, Aaron Bushnell.

Be well, dear reader, I am grateful for your support. Be on the look out for my photography series dropping tomorrow for you wonderful paid subscribers.