Practice Turns

Christine Borland, 

Practice Turns; Spinster, 2023, Edition 3 of 9, 

Practice Turns; Spool Winder, 2024, Edition 1 of 9

Hahnemuhle Photo Rag Matt Fine Art - smooth 308 gsm paper. Printed using Epson Ultrachrome HDR pigment inks

Two print works from the ongoing Practice Turns series in which the artist isolates and enacts aspects of the process of growing, processing, spinning and weaving flax into linen which she has experienced in the production of her series of cloths. She chooses these ‘stills’ as a way to explore, through the movement of her own body, the history of women’s lives in the production of cloth, considering textiles as an active producer of these histories. Caroline Stevenson notes;

“Borland weaves conceptual threads from her identity as an artist and a mother through the distant past to generations of women – mothers and daughters – whose lives were shaped and dictated through the labour of textile production”

The works presented in Approaching Home; Practice Turns; Spinster and Practice Turns; Spool Winder, both contain terms which the artist noted from the ‘occupation’ section of her mother’s Marriage Certificate; her textile factory job as a Spool Winder and her status (at the age of 23) as a Spinster. 

An important decision in the posing of the photographs was the artist’s consideration of the triumphant 1773 portrait of the botanist on Captain James Cook’s first voyage, Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820) who wears a Māori ceremonial cloak acquired in New Zealand. Banks named harakeke the New Zealand flax (Phormium Tenax) as he thought the material akin to the European flax, Linum usitatissimum.  Acknowledging that her family made their living for generations from the textile industry, the wearing of a humble linen cloak enables the artist to create a character - only slightly removed from herself - who can bear to embody the destructive colonial legacies of that same industry, which brought such wealth to Scotland. Through The Flax Commission of 1870, Scots with linen industry experience were brought to Aotearoa in an attempt to industrialise the growing and production of harakeke; a process which threatened to terminate the on-going transfer of women’s knowledge through generations, as well as badly disrupting the local eco-system. 

The movements isolated in Practice Turns focus on the progressive changes in the perception of the roles of women up to the start of the industrial revolution and the end of hand spinning with the drop spindle, depicted in Practice Turns; Spinster. The drop spindle is an archaic but efficient tool used across the world which enables the spinner to remain mobile as she works, rather than sitting stationary at a spinning wheel. The transition from hand tools to mechanisation;

“saw women criminalized as witches both at the dawn of capitalism and in contemporary globalization” (Federici) 

The shifts in the perception of women’s bodies and who has power over them, extends its influence to the present. Through enacting and depicting the processes involved in the production of cloth using preindustrial means, simple tools and embodied knowledge, Practice Turns reflects the seasonal rituals and intimate connection between body and process prevalent before the modern scientific and industrial era displaced women as growers, healers and makers of cloth.