The ‘Red Thread Ranis’ project is my dream to visit three contrasting indigenous women’s communities within one year in order to understand how they communicate through narrative textiles. The Arctic Inuit women’s wall hangings from Baker Lake, Nunavut, Desert Santal tribal women Khatwa artists in Jharkhand, India and Island Kuna women Mola makers in Kuna Yala Archipelago off the coast of Panama are the three groups of indigenous women artists who express their worldviews through what I think of as “Graphic Novels in Cloth.” For forty years textiles and folklore have been the key elements of my artistic life. From my early encounters with Scottish weavers and their ‘Orain Luaidh’ (Fulling Frolic) songs at the 1960’s Mariposa Folk Festival to a current ten-year project with Santal tribal women’s narrative appliqué in India, I have engaged with communities to find stories told through cloth. The magical moments are when you find work that connects directly with another artistic expression in a dramatically different place and time.
Dr. Skye Morrison, Hastings, Ontario
The Red Thread Ranis are a loosely knit group of textile activists, artisans and fieldworker’s who believe in the communicative power of narrative textiles. Inspired by the feminist economist Marilyn Waring who has analyzed the value of women’s daily work around the world, we are examining a highly specialized art form independently created by indigenous women. Our research involves a fieldwork practicum for students of textiles, ethnography and women and development. Our method of enquiry is to collect “personal experience narratives” of artist’s worldviews in each community. Utilizing artistic and aesthetic criteria we will conduct field visits to document and observe their environment. Mentoring students from Canada, Panama and Indiawe will be creating an integrated website consisting of three individual websites, and exhibitions linked through the central theme of Stitching the Flat World Together. In this way our multi-faceted approach can be shared with the next generation of researchers. Our research will bring together three communities of aboriginal women to compare and contrast their encounter with the global economy in the twenty-first century. This enquiry will be useful to aboriginal communities, folklorists, designers, women & development studies, artists and economists those who wish to know what makes us human.
