The Flax Grower

Christine Borland 

The Flax Grower, the Flax Spinner, the Flax Weaver, 2023

Narrated Dialogue written and performed by Christine Borland & Grace Borland Sinclair, 3 x Film Projections (2023) 

Motion-captured 3D visualization
Each 12 minutes, looped, CGI by John Butler

Attending to both historical and future-facing lore embedded in the growing and hand-working of textiles; The Flax Grower, The Flax Spinner and The Flax Weaver films capture the physical movements of the artist (re)enacting these archaic processes, accompanied by the soundtrack of dialogue between her and daughter, Grace Borland Sinclair. Grace is a Doctoral Researcher of Scottish Women’s Speculative and Science Fiction. A personal, political, and imaginative exchange exploring knowledge inheritance emerges, drawing from the captured motions of a maternal body undertaking textile labours at the edge of her limitations. 

Christine’s narration chronicles the cycles involved in her first experience of growing flax from seed, which was subsequently spun into linen thread and woven into a cloth (Foundation Cloth). Through the embodied enactment of simple processes, the films make an intimate re-connection between body and process, prevalent before the modern scientific and industrial era displaced women as growers, healers and makers of cloth. In her narrative, Grace responds as an alienated voice which draws on a myriad of references; from mythology and folklore to religion and philosophy, from natural histories and bloody conflicts to literary fiction and song, to seek a connection from a far future with women from a distant past who grow and make.

Depictions of women as abundant nature goddesses associated with high status changed through the early 16th – mid 18th Century, to depictions of the old witch (often spinning flax) as a symbol of disorder in nature and society. The beginning of the industrial revolution and the growth of capitalism and Empire saw Early Modern Europe immersed in witch-hunts and witch trials. In Scotland, a disproportionately high number - estimated to be between 4,000 to 6,000 people, were tried. As international feminist scholar Silvia Federici investigates in her book; Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women, periods of social and economic upheaval often coincide on a global basis with a shift in the public perception of women, resulting in a great loss of power and a disconnect in women’s relationships with their own bodies. 

Weaving on assorted loom types, from backstrap to upright, has been practiced by women across the world for many centuries, only becoming a male profession in later industrialised and urban contexts. With their gendered associations, words connected to textile production are an important part of the etymology of European languages; weaving is the root of text, Linum, the Latin for linen is the root of the word line and (most appropriately for the four film works), the old-fashioned, folk-term for telling a story is spinning a yarn. In her essay, Christine Borland's Philosophy of Making, Caroline Stevenson notes the fundamentally embedded nature of textile production across diverse societies and cultures;

“Conceptually, textile is also an active producer of history. It is a socially enacted material that weaves through our everyday lives: the interface between our bodies and the world. Textile is also deeply entwined with language. It speaks through familiar metaphors such as binding together, spinning yarns and stitching up, and, according to Tim Ingold (2007), it is the genesis of text itself – the first human attempt to create a surface from a series of lines and the first method of recording human process in a linear notation”

TRANSCRIPT 

The Flax Grower 

DIG: It starts with one line of string laid out in my front garden, in early spring. Further lines radiate from the centre point to make six equal segments. Cutting down with the spade, I shuffle around clockwise, joining the outer point of each string to make one continuous, circular brown slit in the grass. And then I dig. 

The warmth of genesis. Inception radiates. An organic rhythm thumps beneath the surface. Pale flesh flushes with crimson. Saturation bursts. Open terra, seductive, bewitching. Calloused hands reinforce one another, rough cloth absorbs beads of salt. Straining together, breathing as one. Relief echoes. Distance evaporates, linearity dissolves. Faces turn, lips sculpt words in the frosty air. Primogenitor, ancestor, mother. 

RAKE: The small amount of topsoil underneath the turf is poor because the garden is still really part of the rocky beach across the road. I wheelbarrow in tonne-bag fulls of topsoil and rake it together with compost, until I think I have a seed-bed of fine tilth. 

A world comes into focus. Grey sky, a biting wind, the rich smell of petrichor. Intimacy creeps, the figures sharpen. A smooth wooden handle charged with organic current. Imbued with purpose. Lines in the earth form a pathway into the past. 

SOW: Mother’s Day, 31st March 2019 — one daughter weighs out enough of the silky brown seeds to make a dense planting of two thousand plants per square meter. The family line up and I make us rehearse until we can sow our allocated section of seeds in a smooth, circular choreography. 

Eyes open to a deluge of dirt. The earth’s mouth gulps greedily. Submerged, scuppered, entombed, enshrouded. For ten days there will be silence. Long-awaited verdure slithers beneath the surface, waiting patiently to be born again. High above the figures flicker, bent and silent. Faces blurred, they move in patterns. Rise, step, crouch. Rise, step, crouch. A facsimile of generations long past.

WATER: Flax seedlings are frost tolerant and they begin to emerge on April 16th after sleet and snow. I pull one up; the strong branching root makes up two-thirds of the plant. Next day the hottest recorded spell of April weather begins. I hadn’t anticipated this, but I water every second day, using twenty-four watering cans each time. 

A new sound, a light in the dark. Transparent, tasteless, odourless, colourless. No, not colourless. Particles swirl to make green. Droplets of memory, a hand pulls back a curtain. Blurred spectres flicker across the ether. A dry globe in reverse. Empty chasms fill with sustenance. Concrete cracks, a force pushes back against gravity. The ignition of the inevitable. 

WEED: There are many vigorous weeds, most of which are new in my garden so probably arrived in the topsoil. I look them up as I go and nearly all have associations with traditional medicine — Plantain; leaves in poultice used for sores, blisters, swellings and insect stings. The physiotherapist I see for my shoulder says she recommends all her middle-aged female patients take two table-spoons of ground flax seeds a day to replace oestrogen’s anti-inflammatory properties. 

Separation. Everything was once not whole. Remove the bad, preserve the good. A strange pounding from within. Dormant sensations return to the surface. Pummel. Pound. Small, invaluable. Can’t let it get away. A flash. The last vestiges of flora. The opposite of alive pulses. A bitter taste on the tongue. Stomach churns. To protect is to destroy.

PULL: In late June the first fragile blue flowers open, each lasts a day before fading to form a seed-head. On a sunny morning, a hundred and sixteen days after sowing, I pull the flax. Starting from the outside of the circle, I gather a small bunch with my right hand and pull up with my left, repeating until I can’t comfortably hold anymore. At the end of the day the circle is edged by sixty bundles of flax, these are stored to dry the colour of straw. On a roasting September afternoon, my eldest daughter visits; wearing a shocking pink silk skirt she helps remove the dry seedheads, using a rolling pin to crush and a pillow case to catch. 

Hands feel for invisible intricacies. Unknown textures and remote familiarities, a distant memory of movement. Smooth and rough. Eyes turn towards the ground, skin puckers with forgotten feeling. Palms crack. What was once soft and pure transforms. Time moves backwards. Now worn, adept. Fingers grasp at unseen shapes, feet trace a circular pattern. Alive used to have an opposite, what was it?

The Flax Spinner 

BREAK: The flax is dried again after lying on the grass, rotting to muted greys and browns in the October dew. The brittle stalks break under any kind of pressure and its thrilling to see fibres inside. Crunching and snapping, the stems are fed from flower to root end into the blade of a borrowed flax-break. When the bunch is pulled out it’s no longer straight but a rippling horse tail of rough fibres, with bits of straw attached. 

The almighty valves of the accordion bellow out glistening particles into the frosty air. Its heavy pendulums swing back and forth, forging a quiet threshold. A transitory meeting place. Little Oom and the basket of burning jelly stumble in the night. A blue pebble in a mouse’s skull. All things must die. I am all things. Therefore, I must die.

SCUTCH: The scutching board is a plank of smooth pine, cut higher on one side and inserted into stable wooden feet. My mother threatened me with a good scutching if I didn’t behave, I remember this as I hook the bunch around the board’s raised shoulder and strike rhythmically with a wooden sword, shaking and turning until there are no bits of straw left. I work with many different helpers, it is dusty, noisy work and before it occurs to wear masks, makes our nostrils black and eyes red. 

The vulgar tongue snakes across the wooden plank. A rough cloth muffles the rhythmic throb. Prickling vibrations claw at the edges. Electric pulses startle in a hollow wooden cavity, cardboard coral that can’t get wet. The cat o’ nine tails rips apart skeletal skin, discarded flesh gulped hungrily by writhing little makers. Ornamental strands bind brittle calves until only a single chord remains. A seeded organism held together by the promise of futurity.

HECKLE: Everyone wants a turn at heckling; we swing the flax-tail from behind our backs, down through three descending sizes of combs in turn. Nervous of the precious fibres caught on the teeth, I instruct to think of a child’s head and comb from the ends towards the middle, moving back to the coarsest comb if there’s a knot. Never tug. The long, line flax is tied in bunches and hung against the wall to be admired, the range of grey, white and yellowish tones is incredible. 

Sharp blades of rusting grass burst upwards from a dry and desolate savannah. Sparks crackle across rake marks in the torrid air like rigid ripples of luminous algae, blooming through the black swell. An ancient Emperor sits cross-legged on a golden throne and slides a tile of bone, dotted with red and black, across the backs of her people. The mah-jong flowers form neat rows of carved stems, pounded into an infinite abyss by a porcelain hammer. Glimpses of pearl. 

DRESS: Organising the combed fibres to dress the distaff for spinning is intense and makes me hold my breath in concentration. I start by tying a tail of flax around my waist. While sitting, this is fanned out, letting each individual fibre overlap it’s neighbour to gradually form a calf-length, filament skirt. After untying, I kneel to roll the flax fan around the cone distaff and attach it in the distinctive criss-cross of a medieval princess hat. 

Axis mundi. Bright ribbons flash around the maypole that stretches between worlds. The belt that was never Orion’s strikes a pale plane of fibrous cloud. The quiet whisps shatter the hand that strikes. Lingering tendrils seep through muddy rifts. Tributaries merge at the helter-skelter of this mortal coil. Peeling knuckles tighten on the coarse mat which hurtles toward unmaking. 

SPIN: I have a simple drop spindle, bought after a short course and practice sporadically. It only starts to come naturally when I trust the bite of twisted fibres between my finger and thumb, judging how long to hold back before releasing the twist up into the untwisted fibres on the distaff. Switching to the spinning wheel means a new synchronising of hands, and feet with water or saliva to dampen the spun thread. But the fingertip memory of twist is the same and with many good, patient teachers and co-spinsters, I learn. 

A small stick jams the wheel, rekindles the flame. The blinding horizon fades. The cycle begins again. Sandpaper tongues wet a new wick and the strained coil of the contortionist unfurls. Soon to be rewound again by the pristine feet of dancers from a distant land. Fortuna’s tentacles spread in ringlets across time. Unseen navigators of a plaited neural pathway. Synapses cannot fire alone. 

SKEIN: From now on, its necessary to keep the spun yarn neatly organised for efficient weaving. I’m keen to wind it in loops around my forearm and foot, but this is not consistent enough and instead it needs wound on a niddy-noddy. I resent this little shaft of turned wood and the YouTubers who birl it like majorettes while moving the thread up and down in continuous N formation. I love the resulting skein though. By holding each end of the loop, twisting then releasing, it coils back on itself making a tight double-helix of yarn.

A waxing crescent, shoulders bent inwards, contracting, shrinking. Threads tug at wrists, a dancing marionette. One-two-three-four, un-deux-trois-quatre, eins-zwei-drei-vier. Chained feet shuffle forward, rhythmic steps and an acapella note. Jagged lines in the dust. Twisted echoes squeeze ligneous ribs. Tighter and tighter. Ensnared in a net of constellations, wrenched and heaved towards the surface.

The Flax Weaver 

CAKE: The skeins from the niddy-noddy are pulled loose and slipped over the closed wooden spokes of an umbrella-swift. Opening this device ingeniously tensions the yarn, preventing tangles as it winds onto the second contraption, a yarn-winder. On finding an end and turning the handle, a fibre umbilicus untwists from its’ cradle of spokes to make neat little, appropriately named ‘yarn cakes’. 

Decaying Manus plays tug-of-war with his wife’s median nerve. He tugs at the exposed tendons, plucking Kindertotenlieder, as her limp finger twitches on. Light is not eternal but fleeting. They have only gone out, they will soon be coming home again. A warmth at the mouth, a quack from the wolf’s belly, a strand of hair curled round the bedpost. The last remaining nucleus shivers in the cave at the end of the world. Sifted sugar melts on the tongue. Organs piled up at the water pitcher. Pleurisy of the dying sawn. A beautiful abnormality was what she called me. The weight of the blue blanket muffles her bulging belly. 

WARP: The loom is prepared for weaving by attaching the warp threads, which run vertically. First these have to be measured and organised around a pegged, warping-board, which looks a bit like an oversized child’s toy. Following Lynne, I wind the thread across, down, across and back again for a count of 8 loops, with an extra criss-cross between pegs, at two different points. Consistency is important but it’s hard for two people to do this job and keep tension uniform. 

The cerulean marble cast deep within a primordial ooze. The parietal eye lured from its inner sanctum, doors barred, its fleshy membrane set alight. She and they all under the same skin. Eons of glacial manipulation, reversals of a natural state. A big green worm with rows of rolling teeth, tiny claws burrowing into pale wrists. Mortality salience, pathogen avoidance. A brittle form struggles inside a glass cocoon, tugging at its roots, writhing from the curvature of gravity’s spell.

WIND: The weft thread is held inside the wooden shuttle-casing on what I would have called a bobbin, but is more correctly termed a ‘pirn’. From the Dictionary of the Scots Language; ‘Pirnie’ a woman or child who loaded the weaver’s pirns with the yarn from the spinning-jenny. Our pirn empties regularly and has to be rewound from a yarn cake. Thinking of the nursery rhyme Wind the Bobbin Up, I look up the words and find a Mumsnet thread on whether singing it with toddlers trivialises the memory of conditions in Victorian textile mills. 

The steady sanctity of inertia. Ten long years we have waited on emerald shores, while the ravenous watchers tear our men to molecules. Evergreen fans line the streets of the great city, furling and unfurling to the soft chorus of lingering hope. A winged mortar and a fence made of bones, twelve axe shafts and a blazing wooden stake. Spat by the daughter of Poseidon on to bloodied ivories of sifting sand, only to be guzzled once more. The uncontrollable thirst of the two faces, eating flies and dancing in castles. 

WEAVE: In a spinner’s reunion we visit the weaving studio and take turns at being weavers for a day. The weft thread unravels as the shuttle is ‘flown’ from left to right and back again through tented warp threads. It moves into its final place in the cloth when a beater comb is pulled forward. Every one of my shuttle-passes either gets stuck or flies onto the floor. The clunking of the pedal and jangle of the metal heddles as they raise the warp thread, takes me to skipping past lace factories, to reach my dad’s work. 

Manifestus Manus: twenty-seven bones and a conduit of power. Aristotelian ‘tools of tools’. Demand, promise, summon, dismiss, threaten, question, deny. A leather glove trails outside the carriage window. Crystalline tears flow like dew drops over silver sprigs and golden boughs. Crashing in seismic shudders towards the supple heart of the sacrificial bud. The Doric chiton cloaks a ruling shimmer, whilst the tiny body cries silent accusations. A thin tightrope from one ear to another, vibrations in the air carry. The slip of a silk-clad foot, stomach in your throat, darkness rushes upwards. “Live on then, and yet hang”.