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Decorating Stains:
Everyday Textiles in the Work of Anne Wilson

by Ren Ewart

With us at almost every moment of the day, our proximity to textiles invites a multifaceted consideration of their communicative power. Offering utilitarian, sentimental, and mnemonic functions, domestic textiles bear the marks of conflicting social structures: the materials of family-arity; the materials of self-dependence and wage labour . . . a network of cloth can trace the connections of love across the boundaries of absence, of death, because cloth is able to carry the absent body, memory genealogy, as well as literal material value.¹

In light of these connections, textile-based art is a potent medium for intertwining the social histories of gendered labour. While the significance of a continued resurgence of textiles since the 1970s, when explicitly feminist textile-based art first emerged, has been well documented, there have been limited attempts to consider how contemporaneous artistic and political movements affected and influenced this work. This essay seeks to investigate the intersections of textile art, feminist maintenance art, and labour debates, showcasing the value of repair and needlework practices to consider the afterimages of these developments.

Case studies to examine the intersection of everyday textiles and maintenance art are the hair and cloth works of Chicago-based artist Anne Wilson (b. 1949).² Wilson’s work, well regarded within the field of textile art, reframes needlework embroidery as a result of ongoing maintenance and through its intricate stitching points to the interwoven nature of the body and domestic labour within everyday sites of stain and damage. Describing the parallels between the textile act of seaming and the formation of non-linear stories, Catherine Dormor sees potential in patchwork, fragmentary, and fraying art as a means to depict alternative narratives of the everyday. “There is something inherently ambiguous about the seam,” Dormor writes. “[A]t the same time as it brings two or more pieces of cloth together, it sets them apart. It functions both as an extending mechanism, whilst also as a limit. The seam conceals and asserts the raw edge of the fabric, the space between the pieces and bodies: a crevice, a suture, a scar.”³ By using hair as a key tool in her fibre works, Wilson challenges assumptions of stained cloth and hair as waste material, celebrating their shared tendency for imperfection and impermanence. In blending these materials at sites of stain, Wilson draws attention to the ways in which bodies and fabric both encounter fraying, leakage, slippage, and trace through everyday use. Wilson’s act of touch thus arrives as a challenge to hegemonic approaches to stains as something to be avoided, as the sites of seaming remind the viewer of the constant role of touch within the needlework process. The ambiguity of the seam as both a site of damage and a site of connection evokes the uncertain potential within the tapestries made by Wilson, whose needlework accentuates, meddles with, and maintains sites of damage within everyday objects. Drawing from a range of thinkers within textile studies, feminist theory, and art history, I investigate the ways in which Wilson’s practice reframes labour narratives through fine art embroidery, presenting marks and stains as something to be simultaneously disguised and upheld. Looking at the recurring use of stains and hair in her practice, I examine how Wilson draws on images of bodily secretion as a challenge to domestic taboos.

Anne Wilson, Grafts (#2), 1993, Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Household Skills and Protest Aesthetics

“This is an intimate space, a space of close-vision:
the curl of a hair, the twist of a thread,
the crease of a cloth.”⁴

Wilson’s Grafts series from 1993, in which textiles are stained, torn, and burnt through, only to then be embroidered with intricate needlework, presents the meticulous act of decorating damage. First venturing into domestic textiles upon receiving a collection of fabrics from her mother, Wilson began to investigate the textiles for points of damage, locating stains, sites of aging, and irregularities in the otherwise pristine material, only to then burn, bleach, tear, or exaggerate them in her making process. In much of her early body of work, the materials listed are limited to hair, thread, and cloth. Wilson blended her cotton embroidery thread with sourced human hair, seaming around the holes of her work. The practice of seaming appears as a key artistic strategy within Wilson’s work, echoing Pennina Barnett’s theory of close-vision by making prior stains and damage hypervisible to the viewer. Her use of hair, housed in large storage trays within her studio, is not traced to a specific individual within the piece, and the hair’s anonymity leads to a relationship with the human material that is at once intimate and alienated. Given the co-constitutive relationship between human and non-human matter in the making, repairing, and wearing of cloth, Wilson’s practice investigates “the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects”⁵ on both a small and large scale. Stray hairs and stains, often highly personal traces of human activity, are presented as public artefacts.

Preceding Wilson’s early fibre works by two decades, the emergence of domestic fabrics within 1970s feminist art, which challenged the division between creative production and daily maintenance, stands as a clear precedent in its treatment of bodily and domestic materials. During the 1970s, second-wave feminist conceptions of everyday maintenance were increasingly brought into the gallery environment, and figures like Mierle Ladermann Ukeles, Mary Kelly, and Martha Rosler used domestic motifs to call attention to the underpaid and undervalued position of everyday manual work. In close step with these developments, the emergence of fibre art in the 1970s as a protest tool and the publication of Rozsika Parker’s seminal text The Subversive Stitch in 1984 underscored the ways in which needlework embroidery, a craft largely consigned to the domestic sphere, offered a powerful medium through which to bridge public protest and private experiences of the household. Parker argued that needlework served as a compelling standpoint from which to consider the relationship between women, artistic practice, and the domestic sphere. Embroidery upheld feminine ideals while offering a craftwork alternative to male-dominated gallery spaces.

In the co-optation of needlework in feminist art practice during the 1970s and 1980s, textile artists frequently vacillated between striving to elevate the position of embroidery to the level of fine art practice and seeking to acknowledge its longstanding position within the everyday domestic space as a form of labour. Against this backdrop, exhibitions and critical commentary often had to adopt a complex and contradictory register. Needlework collectives frequently emphasized the ways in which textile-making was bound to established means of production through exhibition statements such as the one published in 1979 by the Women’s Domestic Needlework Group:

The work in this exhibition is not revolutionary. It contains the contradictions of work under capitalism. However, the contradictions under which this fancywork has been produced, the functions it has served, and the beauty of the designs provide a valuable record of women’s work for us today.⁶

Describing the creation of a critical discourse surrounding the domestic feminine through craftwork, textile researcher Elizabeth Emery writes that “needlework, with its historical associations with women’s passivity under patriarchy, was laden with reference to the lived experience of women in the domestic. Feminist craftwork drew up the abject associations of women’s needlework and its culturally maligned status within grand narratives of art.”⁷The return of embroidery under second-wave feminism thus arrived with a twist: works utilised bodily matter, irony, and references to the drudgery of housework to underscore the unglamorous and overlooked position of domestic labour. Art historian Alexandra Kokoli describes this re-appropriation of needlework as the “feminist uncanny,” writing: “The return of the feminine bears the mark of its imposed exile, from which it broke free; its scars are what is uncanny and its return against the odds is terrible. The feminist uncanny is thus perpetually suspended between revision and revenge.”⁸ In this regard, the use of textiles during the second wave often employed motifs of secretion, leakage, and bodily margins to emphasise the “disjuncture between imposed femininity and lived female sexuality,”⁹ mirroring and evoking images used in feminist performance art.

Tracing and Exhibiting Manual Labour

“They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.”¹⁰

Deconstructing the divisions between high and low craft, resurgences in needlework gesture toward the ongoing role of domestic embroidery as a form of everyday manual work worthy of recognition, payment, and critical consideration. In addition to wider socio-political campaigns such as Wages Against Housework, the Anglo-American art scene also began to witness a surge in domestic-centred political activism, the most notable being Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Maintenance Art Manifesto 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition “CARE.” These initiatives stressed the ways in which labour, care, and art were not mutually exclusive categories and sought to blur the lines between mundane work and creative production in their exhibitions. Influenced by the ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp, Ukeles sought to redefine art to include objects and acts of manual labour:

I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife. I am a mother. (Random order). I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc. Also, (up to now separately) I 'do' Art. Now I will simply do these everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art [...] My working will be the work.¹¹

Ukeles’s redefinition of art in this way was a reaction against the division between creative production and maternal labour she encountered upon the birth of her first child. As Ukeles recounted, “I literally divided my life in half. Fifty percent of the time I would be the mother with the baby. Fifty percent, I hired somebody to take care of the baby and I would go to another place and be that artist.”¹²

Voicing the emergent arguments of the Wages Against Housework movement, Ukeles’ work stressed the invisible and unwaged or underpaid labour which functioned as a pillar within cultural and social production. While the cult of domesticity was supported by an idealization of women’s maternalism and nurturing instinct, as Dorothy E. Roberts has described, the running of a household often resulted in a division of feminine labour into the categories of the spiritual and the menial. In this division, the spiritual labour of the household was praised through images of the good mother and the domestic goddess, and the menial labour of drudgery could be hidden, delegated, and sustained through hierarchies of class and race: non-white women historically accounted for a large proportion of domestic care work, administrative support work, and “back room” forms of daily maintenance in countries with large wealth discrepancies.¹³

Ukeles called for a re-evaluation of the value of maintenance labourers, those tasked with the job of maintaining a system’s daily functioning. She did so within the domestic frame in works such as Dress to Go Out/Undressing to Go In (1973), on an institutional scale during her museum-based performances such as Hartford Wash: Washing/Tracks/Maintenance (1973), and on a city-wide scale during her unsalaried residency with the New York Department of Sanitation in Touch Sanitation (1978–80). While earlier art manifestos like those of Fluxus and Dada had argued the creative need for deconstruction and disintegration, Ukeles instead proposed a radically creative reappraisal of everyday upkeep that pointed to the significance of the background maintenance required to enable the creative process: “to maintain the creation, then you have to dust it, you have to take care of it.”¹⁴ For Ukeles, this work was embodied in the act of cleaning, an ongoing act of maintenance largely overlooked in discourse.

Against the backdrop of feminist maintenance-focused artists seeking to incorporate the rituals and labours of domestic life into their creative practice, the American artist Mary Kelly exhibited both a theoretical and material documentation of housework within the gallery space.¹⁵ Framing labour and art as a non-mutually exclusive site of production, these projects sought to exhibit the artefacts of the everyday, echoing Ukeles’s rhetorical question in Maintenance Art Manifesto 1969!: “After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?”¹⁶ In her most renowned work Post-Partum Document (1973–79), Kelly collected objects associated with the childcare of her newborn son: baby clothes, used liners from the inside of cloth diapers, his first efforts at writing, as well as speech events and documentation of early motherhood. Kelly’s decision to present these material artefacts of the body, most notably the stained diaper textiles and infant-worn clothing, was met by outrage at the exhibition’s opening. The inclusion of bodily traces was a sharp departure from the concrete, steel, and wood of contemporary minimalist practice. In its multimedia form, Post-Partum Document functions as a catalogue and atlas of labour that foregrounds the maintenance expected in the continued production of the everyday domestic space, not only in child rearing, but in laundry and cleaning. How might these traces of human material and everyday fabric offer a form of counter-archive, a showcasing of memories and work previously overlooked? Showcasing the potential of fabric as both fetishized object, index, and article of psychoanalytic assessment, Post-Partum Document’s use of everyday textiles sought to stretch the form of the documentary and to foreground domestic stains as a powerful form of witnessing.

Centring her work in the act of cleaning, Kelly jokingly referred to the laundry room as the abject room, using Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection to point to the ways in which the act of cleaning laundry can confront individuals with their own “corporeal reality.”¹⁷ In a similar vein, Yeesung Lee identifies the textile-sphereas a form of relational space, noting that “the link between textiles and space has often been explored from an architectural point of view.”¹⁸ Within this approach, using domestic textiles such as tablecloths, napkins, and bedsheets can offer an insight into the textures of daily life and give voice to interior worlds. Lee describes cloth as the “archetypal material of Schwelle,”¹⁹ using Walter Benjamin’s term to evoke the permeable and relationally complex capacities of cloth.²⁰ The closeness of fabric to the body can draw attention to the ways we are quietly altered; moments of staining, wrapping, and dressing highlight our interdependence with our daily fabrics. Kelly’s use of worn laundry reoccurs throughout her œuvre, ranging from her early work Nightcleaners (1975) to her use of soiled nappies in Post-Partum Document and washing machine lint screens in her later work the Circa Trilogy (2004–16). In the laundry room, an individual encounters the secretions of the body and the rituals of daily labour in addition to the various cultural expectations placed upon gender and motherhood within the domestic sphere.

The decision to accentuate stains as a form of confessional documentary proved no less controversial in later decades. Tracey Emin’s installation My Bed (1999), using soiled bed linen as a canvas for the accumulated detritus of daily living, arrived to critical furore upon its Tate debut. A contemporary of Wilson, Emin has said that “everybody has had a stain in their life to some degree, I’m just saying it’s OK. It’s all right,”²¹ an explanation which illustrates the significance of textile’s closeness with the body as “one of the most intimate of thing types.”²² Its capacity to carry memory, material value, and genealogy long after receiving the imprint of its user imbues it with a powerful degree of animacy.

As in Kelly’s and Emin’s installation practices, Wilson’s textile presentation challenges the treatment of stain as taboo, highlighting sites of bodily trace through her use of human hair, while layering these moments through intricate needlework. Stains mark the site of an event, tracing an object’s encounters with the world. Stains can speak of recent moments or events long passed, pleasant memories or sites of trauma. Wilson’s use of stained and damaged household fabric points to the textile as a document of private secretion while also foregrounding how much effort is usually taken to disguise evidence of grime within the home through stain removal methods, washing, mending, and the total replacement of damaged fabrics.

Relational Capacities of Fabric

“The magic of cloth, I came to believe, is that it receives us:
it receives our smells, our sweat, our shape.”²³

Carrying traces of bodies long absent, hair and fabric share a rich capacity for memory. Marika Cifor, building on Kate Eichhorn’s work on the archival turn, describes the uncanny potential of including hair in art: “Hair . . . has the ability to long outlive the body from which it grew. Hair is also associated with complex and contradictory affective responses, including notably disgust.”²⁴ Separated from everyday bodily contexts, hair is “made strange as tactile, silent material,”²⁵ retaining its potential as a sign of personhood while also functioning as a tool in the maintenance of fabric. Wilson highlights the shared intimacy of hair and cloth, demonstrating that their closeness to the body establishes them as highly intimate but also malleable substances in witnessing daily life. Like textiles, the lifespan of human hair is significantly longer than that of other bodily matter. As its uses in Victorian mourning art remind us, it holds vital potential as a powerful mnemonic device in addition to being charged with the tactile familiarity of an everyday object. Wilson encourages the viewer to reconsider these sites of damage as locations of alteration, sites in which human and non-human become entangled. The appearance of hair in these fabrics foregrounds the human intra-actions with them as “we dwell and linger, leaving physical traces,”²⁶ and cause damage and stain in the fabrics which house us.

Describing Wilson’s earlier experiments with human hair, Jessica Hemmings writes: “While the components of Hair Work are intriguing, they do feel like fragments, snippets of a conversation cut from the whole . . . a sketchbook of ideas which, if we fast-forward, appear in a full stream of dialogue in later works.”²⁷ The fragmentary nature of Wilson’s early work comes into full force in the long tapestry-like form of Feast (2000),a work in which small segments of embroidered and seamed fabric are stuck to a long banqueting table using pins. The table displays a rich structure of small pieces of damaged and repaired damask linen. Each section of embroidered hairwork is scattered with holes, bleach stains, and burns, which stand out against the stark white table surface. The holes and marks of damage are seamed with stitches of human hair that run along the tears in the fabric, in an act of un-repair that preserves the site of damage. Sustaining and remembering the tear marks an interesting relationship to damage. As in Jenni Sorkin’s definition of the verb “sustain” as “the continuance and maintenance of stain,”²⁸ Wilson’s hairworks are a departure from the idea of repair as a mode of seamless repression.

In describing the formation of bodily taboo, Mary Douglas argues that “the mistake is to treat bodily margins in isolation from all other margins,”²⁹ calling instead for an approach which intertwines the everyday secretions of the body with other forms of corporeal and material functioning. Wilson’s positioning of her work on tables encourages the viewer to peer and hover near the fabric surface to heighten a sense of proximity, and her team works to create non-liability contracts to allow the removal of touch barriers within her exhibition spaces. An intimate closeness to the fabric in works such as Feast echoes María Puig de la Bellacasa’s description of looking with “fingery eyes,”³⁰ a form of perception which unfolds through a haptic understanding of the world.

With the work A Chronicle of Days (1997–98), Wilson began embroidering small samplers of cloth, limiting her work to the amount of needlework she could complete over the course of one day. “I wanted to make work in which labour was broken down into increments of time,” Wilson observed, “so I began stitching single marks or spots into cloth fragments, the only limitation was that one spot could take no longer than one day to stitch.”³¹These small samples of needlework repair are presented as an accumulated durational work. Each fragment depicts a new instance of Wilson’s characteristic exaggeration and decoration of encountered stains.

The sampler form of A Chronicle of Days speaks to time limitations encountered in daily maintenance work while also sharing Lucy Lippard’s perspective on accumulative textile mediums such as quilting. For Lippard, “the mixing and matching of fragments is the product of the interrupted life. . . . What is popularly seen as ‘repetitive,’ ‘obsessive,’ and ‘compulsive’ in women’s art is in fact a necessity for those whose time comes in small squares.”³² The formed and collected nature of the repair fragments in works like A Chronicle of Days and Feast recalls Elaine Showalter’s theory of patchwork as a method of narrative construction in her text “Piecing and Writing.” Similar to Parker’s challenge against needlework as a purely repetitive act, Showalter underlines how “piecing [is] not simply a repetitious and unoriginal recombining of design elements, but a creative manipulation of conventions”³³ that proposes a new structure in the face of material scarcity. The small sections of needlework build into a rich collection of daily labour, echoing the repeated movements used within maintenance art. Challenging linear narratives of stain and damage through a creation of new forms, Wilson’s uncanny seaming rediscovers discarded textiles to trace their individual trajectories of decay.

Like the bodily traces in Emin’s and Kelly’s work, Wilson’s stains present themselves to us as sites of incident, “uneven and irreproducible,”³⁴ while fracturing the continuity of fabric as a blank canvas. Stains hold cultural associations of hygiene, purity, and social and moral order, challenging and breaking these conventions through their sullying of materials. Faced with social judgments on the condition of a garment, “a stain is provocative in the way it disturbs, the way it marks a surface.”³⁵ Dirt can alienate its carrier, and stain can be a powerful vector for ostracism and character aspersions within a community that values purity and cleanliness.

Stains are accidental, unpredictable, and often permanent, mirroring scars in their capacity to mark their wearer. Stains remember and remind, offering an image of the realities and limitations of everyday materials. Wilson’s choice to elaborate, enlarge, and decorate stains thus arrives as a challenge to invisible approaches to needlework repair. Spending the majority of our lives within textiles, “we are unable to live our life without leaving a part of ourselves behind in them”³⁶and are confronted with their impermanence as an extension of our bodies requiring care and maintenance. Threading these fabrics with human hair both repels and attracts as the human fibres draw attention to our constant entanglement with these domestic fabrics. Like Kelly and Ukeles’s act of bringing maintenance into the public sphere of the gallery, Wilson’s installations evoke the ongoing damage and care enacted upon the textiles of our daily lives. Her inclusion of human hair calls our own bodies into this meditation on decay.

Ren Ewart is a Scottish writer and researcher based in Amsterdam. She is a member of the Feministische Handwerk Partij and the literary collective plot twist. Currently completing a research master’s degree in Art and Culture at the Universiteit van Amsterdam, her thesis explores the relationship between textile repair, material-based memory, and invisible labour.

¹ Peter Stallybrass, “Worn Worlds: Clothes, Mourning and the Life of Things,” The Textile Reader, ed. Jessica Hemmings (London: Berg Press, 2012), 74.
² Born in Detroit in 1949, Wilson studied art at the University of Michigan and Cranbrook Academy, completing her MFA at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. In 1979, Wilson was appointed professor of Fibre and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
³ Catherine Dormor, "Writing Textile, Making Text: Cloth and Stitch as Agency for Disorderly Text," Textile Society of America Symposium, Paper 926 (2014): under “Seaming as Suturing.”
⁴ Pennina Barnett, “Fold, Fragments, Surfaces,” Hemmings, The Textile Reader, 185.
⁵ Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 6.
⁶ The Women’s Domestic Needlework Group, The D’oyley Show: An Exhibition of Women’s Domestic Fancywork (Sydney: D’oyley Publications, 1979), 4, quoted in Elizabeth Emery, "Subversive Stitches: Needlework As Activism in Australian Feminist Art of the 1970s," Everyday Revolutions: Remaking Gender, Sexuality and Culture in 1970s Australia, eds. Michelle Arrow and Angela Woollacott (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2019), 111.
⁷ Elizabeth Emery, “Subversive Stitches.” Arrow and Woollacott, Everyday Revolutions, 106.
⁸ Alexandra Kokoli, The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 39.
⁹ Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: The Women’s Press, 2010), xviii.
¹⁰ Silvia Federici, Wages Against Housework (California: AK Press, 1975), 74.
¹¹ Mierle Lademan Ukeles, “Mainenance Art Manifesto 1969!” in Andrea Liss, Feminist Art and the Maternal, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 52.
¹² Ibid.
¹³ Dorothy E. Roberts, “Spiritual and Menial Housework,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 9, no. 51 (1997): 55.
¹⁴ Ibid.
¹⁵ Within this essay I have chosen to use the term “maintenance art” to broadly describe feminist-aligned artistic practice which seeks to make visible the arduous processes of everyday domestic labour. This term is most notably employed by Mierle Laderman Ukeles in her Maintenance Art Manifesto 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition “CARE.” While the majority of artists I discuss within this text do not directly employ this term in their own practice, these overlapping themes, in particular a desire to re-situate everyday domestic life within a gallery environment, I feel can be accurately enclosed under Ukeles’s manifesto principles.
¹⁶ Mierle Laderman Ukeles, “Blazing Epiphany: Maintenance Art Manifesto 1969!: An Interview with Mierle Laderman Ukeles,” interview by Toby Perl Freilich, Cultural Politics 16, no. 1 (2020), 18.
¹⁷ Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Samuel Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 65.
¹⁸ Yeseung Lee, “The Textilesphere: The Threshold of Everyday Contacts,” TEXTILE 18, no. 2 (2019): 165.
¹⁹ Ibid.
²⁰ Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 494. Schwelle,often translated to the English “threshold,” is described by Benjamin as an experience of passage, a zone in which the boundaries between inside and outside are challenged or dissolved.
²¹ Tracey Emin, “‘Turner Was a Really Raunchy Man’: Tracey Emin on Why Her Infamous ‘My Bed’ Is Really Like a J.M.W. Turner Painting,” interview by Naomi Rea, Artnet News, October 13, 2017, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/tracey-emin-bed-margate-1115603.
²² Judy Attfield, Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life (London: Berg Press, 2000), 124.
²³ Stallybrass, “Worn Worlds,” 69.
²⁴ Marika Cifor, “Stains and Remains: Liveliness, Materiality, and the Archival Lives of Queer Bodies,” Australian Feminist Studies 32, no. 91/92 (2017): 16.
²⁵ Deborah Lutz, “The Dead Still Among Us: Victorian Secular Relics, Hair Jewellery and Death Culture,” Victorian Literature and Culture 39, no. 1 (March 2011): 135.
²⁶ Lee, “The Textilesphere,” 166.
²⁷ Ibid.
²⁸ Jenni Sorkin, “Stain: On Cloth, Stigma, and Shame,” Hemmings, The Textile Reader, 61.
²⁹ Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge, 1993), 121.
³⁰ María Puig de la Bellacasa, “Touching Technologies, Touching Visions. The Reclaiming of Sensorial Experience and the Politics of Speculative Thinking,” Subjectivity 28, no. 1 (2009): 297–315.
³¹ “Contemporary Voices Lecture Series: Anne Wilson,” GW University Museum and Textile Museum, 56:32, Vimeo, February 4, 2021, https://vimeo.com/508445033.
³² Lucy Lippard, “Up, Down and Across: A New Frame for New Quilts,” The Artist and the Quilt,ed. Charlotte Robinson (New York: Knopf, 1983), 32.
³³ Elaine Showalter, “Piecing and Writing,” Hemmings, The Textile Reader, 161.
³⁴ Sorkin, “Stain,” 60.
³⁵ Robyn Healy, “The Parody of the Motley Cadaver,” Hemmings, The Textile Reader, 93.
³⁶Jane Wildgoose, “Considering the Evidence,” Hemmings, The Textile Reader, 66.

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Decorating Stains: Everyday Textiles in the Work of Anne Wilson

Anne Wilson, Grafts (#2), 1993, Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Decorating Stains:
Everyday Textiles in the Work of Anne Wilson