Magic aprons

You have a magic 'apron'. It is woven of your imagination and your voice.

Pat Schneider, Writing Alone and with Others, Oxford University Press, 2003, page 4

I'm not sure if I can still call this a diary, so sporadic are the entries. It's been a strange and challenging year for a number of personal reasons, some of them ongoing. Through it all I've held on, if not to making, at least to thinking about making. These words by Pat Schneider illuminate the point I've reached - my 2022 thoughts and researches and scribblings about relics and Brigid, domesticity, fragments and practice have all coalesced in this one sentence.

Back in October I was reading Ruth Singer's blog post Stitch with Something to Say. Writing about banners and community activist projects, she posed these questions and the last one was like a moment of revelation.

What if patchwork had never grown into the art form it is now? What other large-scale textiles might there be on display? Flags? Sails? Banners? Unique handmade garments?

I wrote a few thoughts in response:

• I've often thought about making aprons and pinafore dresses to wear for housework and for stepping into a making role

• I can wear these in other places as well

• Aprons and pinafores are probably easy to learn to make

• They can carry ideas and messages, found words

• They can be pieced and patched

• They can be made of handwoven fabric or found fabric, and incorporate fragments

• They can be functional and beautiful

• They are layers

• Think about apron pockets, my Mum's peg apron, tool belts

• If I don't want to create art to hang on walls, can I simply wear it instead?

• I am not sure if my voice is social, or political - spiritual, perhaps?

My mother's much-worn peg apron

Aprons, pinafores, pockets. Ritual aprons. Garments with a message. Art that is functional. Clothing that is magical, nurturing and valiant, for my inner being and for the ways I interact with the world. Seeing my work as something to be worn every day, something I put on to do what is asking to be done.

My imagination envisages aprons to celebrate objects, values, people, words. Layers of garments that represent layered realities. My voice says those layers can create magic, valour, nurture; explore visibility and hiddenness.

Aprons express frugal principles: using what I have; learning the skills needed to construct simple overgarments and practical pockets (like a peg apron or a tool belt); learning to use and combine found fabrics to construct them; weaving fabrics to use for this.

The objects that I made are for living with, they are to be used and reused. It is not about fixing into a space but about use and wear, and not a fixed place.

Rirkrit Tiravanija talking with Delia Bajo and Brainard Carey

Yet, how far can you push an apron before it isn't one? Can something be both impractical and practical? Some aprons are made from bones, after all.

It's even harder to focus than usual right now but I remind myself of something I read in Shawna Lemay's Patreon:

The smallest capacities are still capacities.

Shawna Lemay, Transactions with Beauty, Beauty School