Cartographier et se souvenir des lieux liés à l'industrie lainière : fermeture et continuité du travail de la laine dans toute la péninsule maritime.
Oral History
Project
Interviews with textile artists living in Montreal:
Work Realities
for two
Nova Scotia
College of Art
and Design
( NSCAD )
Graduates
in Canada
Two accounts of the adaptation of artists in the early 21st century and the importance of textiles in their lives.
This is a project conducted with guidance by Concordia University's Oral History Workshop seminar, led by Dr. Barbara Lorenzkowski.
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For a transcript of the audio clips in order, please click to a new page here or icon below.
Olivia Mansveld:
first interviewee
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A photo of her home studio where Olivia works on her brand Olive Rose Studio,
constructing one-of-a-kind upcycled clothing with sturdy repurposed fabrics. You can see more of her work at
www.oliverosestudio.com + @oliv.erose
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Quoted from Olivia's website:
"Olive Rose investigates the role and structure of the human heart as it relates to the spirit and attempts to construct its presence in fabric."
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Quoted from The Object of Labour:
"..: all labour is a form of art not yet recognized."
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-Maureen P Sherlock,
Home, Factory, Studio, Exhibit
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Although we knew each other before the interview, I started by asking Olivia about her familial and community influences when she first started working with fabric. She told me that her mother owned a sewing machine, but it was not being used much until she took a home-economics class in high school and fell in love with sewing. Concurrently she had a project at an independently owned thrift store where she and a friend worked after school, looking through discarded clothes to use as material for her school projects. Undoubtedly this experience led to her keen sensibility for fabrics, textiles and fashion that would later influence her education and subsequent creative work.
After attending a community arts fiber college in her hometown, she enrolled in Concordia University's Visual Art program, but soon transferred to NSCAD in Halifax so she could continue to work from an understanding of textiles and do a minor in fashion design there.
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She continues to make clothes from recycled fabrics, and I ask her how her time at NSCAD helped her reflect on this process and the sustainability aspect of it? Her response in audio clip #1:
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I ask if she sees her brand as helping the problem of surplus in the textile industry, or is it more of a creative choice? Her response in audio clip #2:
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Olivia underlines in audio clip #2 the optimism that being young brings in believing that you are making a difference in the world. She has held onto some of this optimism but understands that the problem extends beyond individuals recycling clothes. Still, she finds the limitation recycling brings to the work appealing and in doing so inspires those around her to look at old clothing and scraps as something precious and new. The textile industry is far too complex however to say that even if more consumers buy at thrift stores and recycle clothing, this will make a measurable difference in the environment. Shopping at thrift stores might be an easy and economical solution to opt out of a system of manufacturing which we feel helpless in (Kotsovolos 2021). As some have criticized recently, the 'de-classing' of second-hand clothing, is causing gentrification, rising the low prices thrift stores are known for. This hurts communities who have historically depended on inexpensive second-hand clothing. Furthermore, a surplus of newly cheaply made clothes enters an emptier thrift store, where the value is worse than used items of quality. More affluent communities would do better to support ethically made items, from local manufactures who struggle to compete with overseas manufacture or buying less but higher quality items which last longer (Kotsovolos 2021). Olivia maintains this ethos in her brand, hoping her buyers will cherish their unique items for a long time, appreciating the value of the time and love which went into creating them.
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As Olivia says in audio clip #2 "it's everyone" who needs to change. Not just consumers but the textile industry as a whole and fashion in particular. In this fascinating essay, "The Rise of the Curating Consumer within the Fast Fashion Regime", Mary Kotsovolos specifies "fast fashion regime". She uses the word regime "because fast fashion stores have become powerful social coalitions that shape and maintain elements of socio-technical systems (for example: labour, capital, regulations, supplier networks, infrastructure, market practices, knowledge, and technology—all of these factors are dependant on one another to function) (Kotsovolos 2021)".
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In pre-industrialized societies, clothing was such a laborious activity that scraps were often carefully collected and reused, holes were also mended. The French called the skilled people who did this mending and re-purposing of old and worn clothing "bricoleurs". This tradition continued until clothes were mass produced and it became cheaper to buy new clothes then to take the time to repair them (Kotsovolos 2021). In this way Olivia's method of fashioning clothing is upholding an old tradition that echos back to an era where clothing was more appreciated.
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Up until Olivia graduated NSCAD she was often working in the food service industry to have time to work on her art. I asked her in the interview how her training in textiles at NSCAD prepared her for work in her field. She talked about her first sewing production jobs after graduating. At first she was thrilled to be able to sew full-time, she said, since it was something she really loved to do and could do it "hours on end and not get bored". While working for minimum wage at a children's clothing company run by one of her professors from NSCAD she started to feel more like a "vehicle for production" as time wore on. After a big production was finished, she was laid-off just before the global pandemic hit and on un-employment during a nation-wide shut down when it was the most difficult time to find work. During the pandemic she moved to Montreal, where she was excited to become part of a creative community in a shared studio space. She had a good first experience working part-time for a fashion designer based in Montreal and started developing her brand Olive Rose. The freelance designer treated her, in her own words "as a human with needs", by paying her a decent wage, and eventually became her mentor for a Quebec artist grant. Although the grant only lasted one year, it paid just enough to allow her to be full-time in her creative work and reimbursed her for expenses which allowed for collaborating with professional photographers, models and stylists. Anticipating the end of the grant she took another job in production sewing.
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I asked Olivia to elaborate on the struggle to maintain her creative practice with her brand, while working in sewing production for other brands. She talks about her experience after the grant ended. Her response in Audio Clip # 3.
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The Object of Labor, is a collection of artwork and essays, which speaks precisely to "the personal, political, social, and economic meaning of work through the lens of art and textile production (Livingstone and Ploof 2007,vi)". As Maureen P. Sherlock says in her essay "Home, Factory, Studio, Exhibit":
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Fashion falls into cycle of creating needs to increase demand continuously for every new product, each season. While this may help brands grow and compete in an international free market system it comes at the expense of longevity and durability, the erasure of long held cultural traditions and a habitable environment. As Olivia said in the previous clip, technology has changed much in the industry, but it is still often the case that a human is needed to maneuver fabric under the machine. History shows that as long as there is a supply of cheap labour, modernized technology lags behind and so the people that pay are often under-privileged workers (Laura C. Johnson and Johnson 1982,36).
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Although sewing production is skilled work, the process of breaking up the work into "segments" has allowed for the work to be made into "unskilled" work in modern times. Not only that, women entering textile trades in history were already trained by having done the work domestically, and it so it was not seen as skilled work to the men hiring them. Furthermore, the American Engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor made this segmentation of labour into a science. Segmentation took control over the work from the worker and put it into the auspices of the manager. As Sherlock points out:
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In audio clip #4, I ask what Olivia thinks people in privileged positions within the textile industry in Canada might be able to do to help the situation of under-paid work in the industry and make it over all better work for skilled workers. This prompts Olivia on a long and thoughtful refection, which I took the last two audio clips from. Her responses in audio clips #4 and #5 below:
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It is not surprising that a general critique of capitalism and the distribution of wealth comes up in a conversation about labour and profit and textiles. I found an excerpt which speaks to what my interviewee says generally about the value of production being taken out of the hands of the workers and unfair distribution of wealth. At the very bottom of the supply chain is the industry homeworker, who has no work security, and this is what the author takes up in the book Clothed in Integrity Weaving Just Cultural Relations and the Garment Industry.
However, the critique of the industry as a whole remains relevant:
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A diagram from the same in the chapter of the book, "The International Web of Production", depicts a hierarchical structure which serves as the standard across the industry with retailers at the top of the pyramid. In reality retailers rely on people at the bottom, the garment worker and the consumers. Consumers are able to increase their buying power with better prices, but little of the profit goes to the people who actually made them. "Retailers' markups now start at 100 per cent but are as high as 200 per cent for imported clothing. Clearly, retailers' gain is at the expense of others in the chain and at consumers' expense (Paleczny 2000)".
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If this was the case in the year 2000, then it's not hard to imagine the wealth which top brands have accumulated for marketing, websites, social media influencers, content creators today. As said by Olivia, this is in all industries but especially in fashion that people earn more promoting the brand than making the product which is where the real value is for the costumer.
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Olivia puts her experience into a global perspective, yet relates back to the same issue of distribution of wealth. Audio Clip #5:
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In a Canadian context, Montreal has been internationally recognized for fashion design and production since the 1950s, due to its textile history, the advent of the Expo 67 and a Quebecois identity forming around hockey and its own cultural production. Montreal was also center of the industrial revolution in Canada making it a center of capital and in the 1920s which led to the development of many large retailers in the city's downtown. Sherbrooke street in particular was the home to many of the wealthiest people in Canada and also a growing number of "entrepreneurial dressmakers" who fitted, designed clothes and traveled to Paris, France. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s more Montreal based retailers emerged, however neither Quebec nor Canadian governments were able to establish sustained funding for the exportation of Canadian fashion (Sark and Sara Danièle Bélanger-Michaud 2016).
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Many retailers as a result closed during a recession period leading up to the 1990s. When in 1994 the North American Free Trade treaty was signed, it allowed for more exports from Canada to US. However, this also made way for US retailers to enter Canada at the same time, making it harder for Canadian retailers to compete. The pressure on the retailers by the US market also affected Canadian manufacturing companies, who then moved manufacturing overseas to compete for cheaper labour. This ultimately marked the decline of garment and textile industry in Canada and allowed for a consolidation of wealth to fewer and more powerful transnational "stateless" corporations in retail. It has made for complex relations of power with industrializing nations and put undue pressure on garment workers domestically and abroad (Sark and Sara Danièle Bélanger-Michaud 2016).
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As Olivia said in Audio Clip # 5, the founder of Zara is a billionaire and as of December 2022, "the 23rd-richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of 53.9 billion (Hartmans n.d.)." Zara opened the first store in Spain in 1975 and ten years later in 1985 merged into a larger retailer Inditex, which owns a host of other fast fashion brands. Zara is the most well-known however and its founder owns 59% of Inditex, which is the largest clothing retailer in the world (Hartmans n.d.).
Although Olivia feels her struggle as being an underpaid worker in Canada "pales in comparison" to the struggle of garment workers in Bangladesh, her insisting that it is a problem of distribution of wealth is an accurate enough assessment. No matter where the production is done it still comes down to the same "market forces" and "market fundamentalism" of neo-liberal trade policies and politics which allow for consolidation of wealth and poor pay to the workers:
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While art itself has a long history as a rarified and seperated substance, often presenting itself as superior to the mere surface affect of "style", the truth is that it contains contradictions that parallel those of the economy and the institutional forms of the rag trade is the model not only for art, but all forms of production, distribution, advertising, and consumption. The plight of every textile and garment worker, past and present, is the future of everyone under the rule of a global late capital (Sherlock, Livingstone and Ploof 2007,2).
By segmenting each moment of labor, its control would be totally in the hands of managers who could arbitrarily replace any "moment" in the line with an unskilled or semi-skilled worker or less money, or replace the function with machinery. In wrestling an abstract control of capital from the prodcutibe hands of the worker , the manager seems in full control the product that Marx understood would become the fetishized commodity of exchange value, while the producer of real use value fades into the shadow (Sherlock, Livingstone and Ploof 2007,16).
Globalization of the free-market system is most apparent in the emergence of an integrated world financial system. Financial transactions have exploded to an unprecedented seventy-two times the amount of merchandise trade......By exchanging hot cybermoney on computer screens, investors use money to make money, without investing in production of goods or services. Like the Aboriginal peoples who wrote of sixteenth-century invaders, "All that is of value was counted as nothing," we as people can lament today that investment in much-needed production of basic necessities and services for peoples in Canada and globally is tied up in valueless speculation. Social and environmental costs are ignored (Paleczny 2000,42).
While retailers and managment call for flexibility, workers are required to meet shortfalls in a production quota, to fill gaps in multiskilled production and to accept part-time work, wage concessions and piece rates. The core group of workers is reduced in the midst of a startling shift to non-standard work...Workers are a being forced into isolated, unprotected work patterns in Canada and abroad (Paleczny 2000,69).
New York Textile Lab is a design and consulting company. We design yarns and textiles that connect designers to fiber producers and mills to help grow an economically diverse textile supply ecosystem.......NY Textile Lab believes that the world's textile production should grow out of abundant, regenerative systems that emerge from collective thinking rather than centralized systems that rely on extraction, scarcity and competition (“NY Textile Lab” n.d.).
I did this project to understand the present obstacles and struggles in how textiles have shaped our economy and social lives. Not out of the spirit of "doom and gloom" but to show that things could still improve in Canada as well as around the world. To end this section, here are three promising textile and fashion projects which I will share a brief description and quotes from each: Fibershed including Fibershed Quebec, the New York Textile Lab and the World Hope Forum (underlines link to their respective webpages).
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Since 2019 I have been following the non-profit Fibershed which started in northern California, founded by educator and biologist Rebecca Burgess. A fibershed is simply put, about creating bio-regional textile systems, it's a movement that has grown, morphed and changed from region to region. Currently their "mission" on Fibershed.org states that:
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As of 2022, Fibershed Québec is forming out of UQAM, directed by Dr. Marie-Eve Faust who is also administrative director at l’École supérieure de mode at UQAM. While in its early stages, Dr. Faust aims to focus on Québec's historical textile roots: wool, linen and beaver pelts.
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I have also been watching the New York Textile Lab, which was created by Laura Sansone, assistant professor in textiles at Parson's School of Design in New York city. The NY Textile Lab havs been creating "supply ecosystems" in New York and source books for connecting designers directly to farmers and fiber producers. From their website:
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Lastly, I want to mention the World Hope Forum (notice how it's different from the World Economic Forum). The World Hope Forum is a Dutch initiative launched during the pandemic during Dutch Design Week. Its founders are Lidewij Edelkoort and Philip Fimmano who are both involved in the trend forecasting business of fashion. Edelkoort founded a Textile Masters at Parsons in New York where she was the dean of Hybrid Design Studies for 5 years. They host free online forums world-wide which feature artists, educators, fiber producers and designers from different parts of the world. From their website:
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I have attended a couple of their online events, the most recent one was based in India and the next will be on January 23rd, 2022, in Canada! If you have made it this far, you are probably interested in the Canadian Textile industry and can sign up to watch the forum live, link below:
world hope forum canada — World Hope Forum
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Works Cited
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*All photos provided by the artist, including the thumbnails for the audio clips. (With the exception of the background photo which is a part of the website that contextualizes the interviews)
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“À Propos de Fibershed Québec.” n.d. Fibershed Québec - Page Officielle. Accessed December 17, 2022. https://fibershed.uqam.ca/a-propos-de-fibershed-quebec/.
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“About.” n.d. World Hope Forum. Accessed December 17, 2022. https://www.worldhopeforum.com/about.
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Hartmans, Katie Warren, Avery. n.d. “Meet Amancio Ortega, the Fiercely Private Zara Founder Who Built a $77 Billion Fast-Fashion Empire.” Business Insider. Accessed December 11, 2022. https://www.businessinsider.com/zara-founder-amancio-ortegas-life-and-houses#these-days-amancio-ortega-is-the-23rd-richest-person-in-the-world-with-an-estimated-net-worth-of-539-billion-18.
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Kotsovolos, Mary. 2021. “The Rise of the Curating Consumer within the Fast Fashion Regime,” December. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/357159736_The_Rise_of_the_Curating_Consumer_within_the_Fast_Fashion_Regime.
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Laura C. Johnson, and Robert E. Johnson. 1982. The Seam Allowance. Womens Press.
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Livingstone, Joan, and John Ploof. 2007. The Object of Labor : Art, Cloth, and Cultural Production. Chicago, Ill.: School Of The Art Institute Of Chicago Press ; Cambridge, Mass.
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“Manifesto.” n.d. World Hope Forum. https://www.worldhopeforum.com/worldhopeforum-manifesto.
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“Mission & Vision – Fibershed.” n.d. Fibershed.org. https://fibershed.org/mission-vision/.
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“NY Textile Lab.” n.d. NY Textile Lab. Accessed December 17, 2022. https://www.newyorktextilelab.com/.
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Paleczny, Barbara, and In Religion. 2000. Clothed in Integrity : Weaving Just Cultural Relations and the Garment Industry. Waterloo, Ont.: Published For The Canadian Corporation For Studies In Religion = Corporation Canadienne Des Sciences Religieuses By Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
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Sark, Katrina, and Sara Danièle Bélanger-Michaud. 2016. Montréal Chic. Intellect Books.
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Sherlock, M. P. 2007. "Home, Factory, Studio, Exhibit " in the The Object of Labor : Art, Cloth, and Cultural Production. Edited by Joan Livingstone and John Ploof. Chicago, Ill.: School Of The Art Institute Of Chicago Press ; Cambridge, Mass.
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“World Hope Forum Canada.” n.d. World Hope Forum. Accessed December 17, 2022. https://www.worldhopeforum.com/whf-canada.
Fibershed is a non-profit organization that develops regional fiber systems that build ecosystem and community health. Our work expands opportunities to implement climate benefitting agriculture, rebuild regional manufacturing, and connect end-users to the source of our fiber through education. We transform the economic systems behind the production of material culture to mitigate climate change, improve health, and contribute to racial and economic equity (“Mission & Vision – Fibershed,” n.d.).
The objective of this platform is to federate, to bring together the major players who have developed new industrial, economic, and more virtuous processes, where the center is people. The World Hope Forum's main goal is to create a holistic global platform for the exchange and expansion of knowledge, innovation (“About” n.d.).
Mary Ketterling:
second interviewee
Mary weaves on a standing loom in her home, using wool sourced from Canada. You can see more of her work at www.ketterlingweaving.com + @ketterlingweaving
Quoted from Mary's website:
"The project is focused on explorations of color and modern design, with a dedication to craftsmanship and traditional techniques. The weavings are made to be used and loved in the home for many years."
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Quoted from The Object of Labour:
"All great political theories and social movements find their origins and energies not from the fantasy of a utopian future, but from the memories of forgotten ancestors"
- Maureen P Sherlock,
Home, Factory, Studio, Exhibit
Similar to the interview with Olivia, I started by asking Mary about her early influences and when she first started making textiles. She had no direct family or friend influences in her early years but mentioned a grade school teacher about to retire, who taught her class how to knit because that was what she wanted to do. Mary said, "we spent more time knitting in that class than we probably should have...[laughs]" It wasn't until University that Mary really got into textile work, when she took a sewing class and transferred from a film degree program into a textile major. "In the first year at NSCAD you sample a bit of all the art classes before you work on your major", Mary told me. "In the textile major, you have a fashion design minor which covers a bit of sewing and working with fabrics. The sewing is not as technical as the weaving and dying part of the program", she told me, but it was the sewing class which got her interested in textiles.
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When I asked about how the program prepared her for the work she did after school, she said "It did... not in a literal way, but the idea of planning a project and thinking it through to the end probably helped in an indirect way.... it gives you lots of useful skills", she said, "but as far as concrete skills, sewing was probably the main one". She told me that she didn't think about an art degree as something leading to a direct career path, like she might have with another degree. Art was just something she felt she had to do and wanted to learn more about. "There are some direct translatable skills" she concluded, "but usually it leads to work that just is not very well paying".
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Mary worked at a sustainable children's clothing company run by one of her professor's from NSCAD before relocating to Montreal. One of her first jobs in Montreal was a call center job at SSENSE (a well-known fashion and clothing retailer). She said that this job "wasn't great" and soon she found another one working in a warehouse, at a printer for a textile company. The company prints designs sent by costumers on mostly imported cotton and silk fabric, they produce some of their own products to sell. She said "it was a mix of people who worked there, but definitely mostly women and people from other countries than Canada, possibly also students." She told me it was a more laid-back environment, better pay and they were unionized with health benefits. She was also able to do art again in the evenings, but there were some factors at home which made it hard for her to get much work done, once she got home from work. I ask her in the audio clip about making art while working a full time job, her response in Audio Clip #6:
While working at the call center, she told me it was "mostly emotionally challenging", not being able to work on her art. Although, I have never done a full-time costumer service job myself it is something I have thought of doing as a way to break into a different job market. These entry level costumer service jobs generally hire anyone with a bachelor's degree, and so we are led to believe that this is "intellectual labour" which is better than "manual labour". A call center job may not be so different from a factory work, in being manually and intellectually taxing in similar ways. Mary also told me that she felt very much "on the clock" while working at the call center, even bathroom breaks were kept track of. She felt constantly monitored and stressed about the work, which reminded me much of my first sewing production job. My first sewing production job was also a minimum wage job, with no benefits.
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After three years at the warehouse factory job Mary felt she needed a change and left. So I asked her, "Why do you think you stayed at this job for as long as she did, was it something about working in textiles and being around fabric that you liked?"
Her response in Audio Clip #7:
I was not surprised to hear Mary say that she "doesn't mind manual labour", my own path since studying art has consisted largely of manual labour. In reading the essay "Home, Factory, Studio, Exhibit" by Maureen P. Sherlock, it helped me reflect on whether there is a meaningful division between manual and intellectual labour in the first place. What does it mean if it this division of labour came about since the beginnings of the industrial revolution? Sherlock writes of labour in terms of its ideal form in the human condition:
The primary or ideal condition of human labor is a unity of head and hand, he who thinks and plans the appropriation of nature to transform through labor into a human good finds satisfaction. One may also find fulfillment when working with others on a common project under collective control, as opposed to the capital where one is told what to do by others who do not participate in the labor process and who control the goods made and their distribution for profit. Dissociative fragmentation in modern capital, on the other hand, increasingly separated workers from not only control of their products, but also the satisfactions associated with planning, practicing skills that lead to a finished object, not just a partial one (Sherlock, Livingstone and Ploof 2007,16).
Once Mary was fully trained at the warehouse, she was running the printer by herself, and this gave her independence in the job which she liked. However she was still carrying out the tasks for others to the end of printing. Although she could relieve some of this boredom by listening to podcasts and music it did not translate to satisfying work. I believe her satisfaction was derived from the end of the workday when she had the mental space to plan, think and work on her own projects. It seems that the BFA degree in textiles prepared Mary for work beyond what was asked of her at this job, even if it was textile work. Mary told me anyone could do that job and she was not sure if her degree in textiles made any difference in getting hired. A Christophe Magis identifies in his article, "Manual Labour, Intellectual Labour and Digital (Academic) Labour. A Critical Enquiry of the Practice/Theory Debate in the Digital Humanities" , a distinct paradox, in the percentage of highly educated young people in western societies and the nature of work that is available to them. This has long been true for artists, but increasingly other degrees as well. He askes:
How come, in this case, does a more rational organization of society still seem utopian? The Critical theorists’ answer would be that the intellectual gesture has been shifted: while the intellectual sectors were taken over by industry – and education became a strategic source of profit and control within the entire cultural production – the very act of thinking has been limited to identifying and applying procedures, transforming it into a mere reflection of the industrial machinery (Magis 2018, 167).
This division of manual labour and intellectual labour is most real in that it serves to divide and funnel in a workforce so that the most capital can be earned by creating jobs which are only semi-skilled and abstract. When I talked to Mary about her past employment, it seemed to me that her art is where she presently expects to find satisfaction, not in her day job. This makes a lot of sense when we live in a work climate where most jobs are fairly devoid of any collective meaning for most individuals. People often engage in wage work because they need money to live on, and in that exchange of time for money they want fair compensation, to enjoy time off on their own projects. M. P. Sherlock's writing speaks in a dispassionate attitude towards the state of modern work:
It is in this operation that any dream of collective action on the part of workers dissipates into the faceless abstract "worker" constructed by the disconnected sites of piecework. Since they only produce one section of abstract labor, the lose a sense of being a producer, the sunest of their acts, or masters insome small part of their fate. Under this new managment, time not longer has an ebb and flow, but only a continuous monotony and even the coercive timing of the now (Sherlock, Livingstone and Ploof 2007,2).
In my experience doing sewing production, there was a continuous flow of work and the word "rush" by the managers which accelerated work on the factory floor. I tell Mary how I changed textile jobs just to have a bit more flexibility and slightly better pay. There were no benefits, but it was more laid-back about taking time off. This prompted Mary to elaborate on the question of why she chose to stay in the warehouse job as long as she did (Audio Clip #8):
In this second interview I begin to realize, there is still a lot that I need process in my own experiences working in textile industries. The interview then becomes more of a conversation of sharing some mutual experiences and frustrations about doing underpaid and undervalued work in textiles.
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I talk about the sewing production job I did again. I recall not being permitted to take any days off, other than if I was really sick. At first I enjoyed the work a lot, I was learning to work on an industrial machine, the work was reliable, and I was being tested on my skills. As time wore on, I was pressured go faster and meet the percentage quotas of people who had worked there for over ten years. Breaks were only 10 minutes, and you were told to be back in your seat by the second bell which punctuated the end of 10 minutes. In reality you didn't really rest much on a break, because of the two bells and limited time to take care of any personal matter. I observed that the breaks were just the time needed to smoke a cigarette outside, which a lot of people did. Although people were generally nice and well meaning, there was constant stress coming from higher up, which trickled onto the floor where employees were being shaped physically and mentally to conform. It was really unlike anything I had experienced before.
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[Although, I didn't talk about this in the interview, it wasn't all bad... at times the repetitive work is soothing by keeping the hands busy to free the mind. The work was also consistent and provided structure during a precarious time in my life. There were pleasant sensorial things about being on the sewing factory floor: a ray of sunshine on the sewing table in the morning, the smell of coffee from the breakroom, the tactility of the work, the climatized air, the puttering of machines from neighbors and the general buzz of highly skilled employees, working hard at a collective "art", if you see it like that.]
In the next audio clip Mary empathizes with my experience and her own analysis helps put it into perspective. She refers back to her time working at the children's clothing company, run by her old professor in Halifax. Her words in audio clip #9:
Mary told me that, once her professor asked her to work more just before one of the projects she had assigned in class was due. I asked if it was confusing for her in that situation, Mary told me it wasn't for her, because she just said "no, I can't", but maybe for her professor it was, due to the stress of having a timeline of her own. It confounded me a bit that her professor, had not been able to find some solutions to lessen the pressure from her employees and herself. Maybe it is just the nature of the business.
We continue the conversation in the context of textile industry in Canada, I ask her how she thinks the textile industry in Canada could be a place that more people would like to work and how she thinks the work could be improved? Mary said she noticed a lot of the sewing work was being done by immigrants and reflects on how this is typically work not well paid, she wasn't sure if that is because more women are doing it or something else. Her response in audio clip #10.
In a classic Canadian book about the industrial homework industry, The Seam Allowance, the first pages survey the history of textiles in western culture in relation to gender. In England and most of Europe craft guilds were exclusively for men, and there is legacy of the textile industry being gendered all the way back to the Middle Ages. The guild's function was to control prices and limits quotas which helped keep value in the work and aid scarcity, but those outside of the guilds were unhappy with the exclusivity and high prices for buyers. Eventually cottage industries emerged, run by male merchants who paid mostly unmarried women in rural farming towns to do textile work by the piece. Women in each town specialized in the different steps in making cloth, some spun, some wove and some bleached and dyed the fabric. This allowed the entrepreneur to set the prices they wanted, exploiting the low status that unmarried women had in society, who were called "spinsters". These early businessmen in the Middle Ages were able to sell cloth cheaper and turn a profit, undercutting the craft guilds. When factories opened up wage work to rural communities at the start of the industrial revolution, these cottage industries continued alongside mass production, sharing many "features" where the "individual producer was not an independent artisan, but rather a semi-skilled wage labourer --- a cog in a larger machine which he or she had little control (L.C. Johnson and Johnson 1982, 34)."
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I thought about Mary's comment about how sewing is seen as unskilled work, and what it has to do with the legacy of women's work. It seems to boil down to a relationship between technology, and an expansion of capital in patriarchal systems which continue to this day. For industrial capitalists, garment workers are a wall of resistance to their profit, straight lines and squares are easier to mechanize and automate than the complex tailored shapes of clothing. While there a supply of a domestically trained workforce, little is done to improve time saving technology and the pressure is instead placed on the worker's body to meet the demands of the retailer. Especially rural women who have few other options for wage work, assume a role in which they are replaceable for work that has been done for centuries in the home (Laura C. Johnson and Johnson 1982, 36).
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To conclude the interview, I ask Mary how she thinks artists might be able to re-envision the textile industry to be more humane and not just about money?
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I realize this is an unfair question, in that it is far too complex for a single person to have "the answer". It is my goal to learn more from peoples experience in the industry and that this question serves to provoke thought more than anything. It is hard however to work in the industry and not see some need for change and improvement. Since it is something I wonder myself, I wanted to see if she had any thoughts. Her response in audio clip #11:
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After the audio clips #10 and #11, Mary asks if her answers are too "doom and gloom". I tell her not to worry and part of why I am asking about these things is because we need to really look at the problems first.
I believe why I am doing research on historic wool routes, is to find out based on experiences of workers in the past, where there might have been more a sense of some shared solidarity among working textile communities.
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In doing research to support these interviews, I became interested in the shared precarity of textile workers and artists. The Object of Labour, explores this relationship and has informed much of my subsequent analysis of the interviews. I wondered if artists enjoyed a better status than textile workers if there is a way to show solidarity when faced with similar obstacles?
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A journal article came to my attention, written by a member of the Textiles & Materiality Cluster at Concordia. It's about the eviction of artist studios and textile companies from the industrial revolution era brick cotton mill in Manchester, England called the Crusader. In the article UK artist Sam Meech now teaching at Concordia University, talks about his experience using art as a counternarrative to the narrative of the developer who bought the building and stripped it of its paint and its working communities of people. The article called: "Fabrications: Using Knitted Artworks to Challenge Developers’ Narratives of Regeneration and Recognise Manchester’s South Asian Working Class Textiles Businesses", sets up the reader by explaining how the heritage of the building is being used by the developer:
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It reminds my of an article I read, "Under Storytelling's Spell: Oral History in a Neoliberal Age, in which "storytelling" has become a tool sensationalized for selling people content. Throughout the article Meech documents the site of the eviction, and what took place leading up to it. In this process he interviews one of the workers from the knitwear companies, to take account of what was the reality for the knitwear companies apart from the official narrative. He remarks on the "compensation" the studio artists had compared to the knitwear companies who received nothing and on top of that losing their businesses because of the costs of moving machinery and finding a new space:
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Mentioned in this excerpt from the article is a film called the "Art of Work", which interviews and tells a story of precarity and isolation which both communities shared in this building. To watch the "Art of Work" on Vimeo, click here. The film was directed, produced, filmed and edited by Matylda Wierietielny and Zhi Li. You see in the film the repetitive and manual nature of work in both communities and the skill in which they work with their materials. One noticeable difference however is the pace in which hands work and the type of machinery that accompanies them.
Perhaps this is a fruitful juxtaposition of work to explore more through visual interactive media, film and interviews. To complete this website the "Wool Route" my plan is to make an interactive map with the stories of wool workers. I will draw up the research from these interviews to precise better what aspects of the woolen industry will like to be told or need to be told. I would like to thank both of my interviewees Mary Ketterling and Olivia Mansveld for helping me learn through this process of interviewing and doing research. Please visit their websites at the top of the page to see and follow their work!
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The displacement from Crusader proved to be an insurmountable obstacle for most of the factories. Some businesses folded and never moved, some moved but folded shortly after. One factory (Dream) was locked in a court case with the developers. One factory, Imperial Knitwear (as seen in the “Art of Work” documentary), managed to move to a new site and resume production, only to be destroyed by a fire from a neighboring factory. All in all, of the 7 factories that occupied Crusader in 2017, only Unique Knitwear, in a gloomy validation of their name, is still active today (Meech 2022).
Manchester’s relationship to industrial textile production is often framed in the far past – something that happened, long ago. A “cottonopolis” borne of the industrial revolution, leaving behind a legacy of Lowry paintings and giant mill buildings. It is a distant, romantic framing that conveniently allows us to draw on nostalgia and architecture to inform a sense of metropolitan identity, whilst avoiding any proper examination of contemporary garment production. This simplified brand is actively sustained by property developers, for whom “industrial heritage” adds huge value to a site. The idea of textile production in Manchester is fetishized and valued, much more than the reality (Meech 2022).
Works Cited
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*All photos provided by the artist, including the thumbnails for the audio clips. (With the exception of the background photo which is a part of the website that contextualizes the interviews)
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Freund, A. 2015. “Under Storytelling’s Spell? Oral History in a Neoliberal Age.” Oral History Review 42 (1): 96–132. https://doi.org/10.1093/ohr/ohv002.
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Laura C. Johnson, and Robert E. Johnson. 1982. The Seam Allowance. Womens Press.
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Magis, Christophe. 2018. “Manual Labour, Intellectual Labour and Digital (Academic) Labour. The Practice/Theory Debate in the Digital Humanities.” TripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society 16 (1): 159–75. https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v16i1.847.
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Meech, Sam. 2022. “Fabrications: Using Knitted Artworks to Challenge Developers’ Narratives of Regeneration and Recognise Manchester’s South Asian Working Class Textiles Businesses.” TEXTILE Cloth and Culture, October, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/14759756.2022.2099628.
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Paleczny, Barbara, and In Religion. 2000. Clothed in Integrity : Weaving Just Cultural Relations and the Garment Industry. Waterloo, Ont.: Published For The Canadian Corporation For Studies In Religion = Corporation Canadienne Des Sciences Religieuses By Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
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Sherlock, M. P. 2007. "Home, Factory, Studio, Exhibit " in the The Object of Labor : Art, Cloth, and Cultural Production. Edited by Joan Livingstone and John Ploof. Chicago, Ill.: School Of The Art Institute Of Chicago Press ; Cambridge, Mass.
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Wierietielny, Matylda, and Zhi Li. 2015. “The Art of Work." Vimeo. December 6, 2015. https://vimeo.com/148038319.