Tour the Tangled Webs dress

How I'm Flowing

detail of Tangled Web,
current work in progress, December 21, 2022

I have returned to writing on this blog. A couple of years ago I signed off intending to move on to developing a profile on Instagram and other social media platforms and to essentially archive the writings that began here in 2008.

I had the option of closing it down entirely and deleting everything and are now very glad I didn't choose that. I've come to understand that this is the only platform where can't be censored or cancelled by the new authoritarians:

this is the only place where I have total control and can freely express myself without the potential of being banished, silenced and cancelled. 

This blog has never had much of a public profile and a with just over 200 followers, considering it has been established 15 years, it hasn't been particularly "successful" in some estimations. But having a large following or being "influential" has never had relevance or been much to do with why feel I compelled to write ideas down. The reflections here comprise part of my archive of developing as a visual artist. It is the diary of how I've interacted and responded to personal circumstances and political ideas.

I am glad to return to recording ideas here and in some ways feel compelled to do so because dialectical discourse is being severely curtailed in many of the places where it is supposed to flourish, like within the SDA. In the international internet sewing community. I think apart from entertaining myself and writing as an act to clarify my thoughts, I might even have some interesting views to share. It can be done here without the reactionary Social Justice warriors shutting me down.

in my garden, "FLOW" carved into a sandstone block

Starting today, I'm going to write a little series reflecting on how I think the digital age is adversely affecting creative minds and how I believe there is an inherent incompatibility to successfully integrate technology into artistic ontology...or at least, how attempts to graft the frankensteinian organs are disrupting and significantly harming how creative minds work 

(hint...look this up: Flow)

There is absolutely an incompatibility in being an advocate of Critical Social Justice and being a free thinking critical practitioner of visual art. Any ideology that starts placing limits on what can be said and made is a dangerous, creativity stunting dogma.

                                                 passionfruit flowers growing on deck

FLOW, part one

I'm immensely curious how social media is affecting humans in modernity. I think as a 63 years old woman artist there are some insights, opinions and experiences I have which are unique and going to be valuable in the future. 

I've lived in the crossover eras of three enormously significant social changes putting me in a small group with contemporaries that have knowledge and experience of what our little bit of the world was like before, during and after those changes. By 2040 women like us will be gone so I feel its important to make a record of how I've experienced these changes.

 The social changes I refer to are:

 #1/ the rise and success of 2nd wave feminism, meaning I grew up not expecting to live my life in marriage/family/domesticity but that I would have a job and monetary income that was my own, 

#2/ women were not taken seriously as artists, even more so in non traditional media that wasn't paint, and it was exceedingly rare to be recognised or be a professional woman artist. 

#3/ the world before screens.(what to call this world? I intend to refer to it as "Pre-Tube", meaning before the invention and desemination of the cathode ray screen (television)). By the middle of this century there won't be a human being who hasn't stared at a glass screen that has text and coloured pictures on it. Just as the printing press was a momentous technology that changed how humans lived and stored knowledge the advent of the computer age will impact the direction human of civilisation into the forseeable future. What a strange creature I must seem to young people that I was 10 when I saw my first televison. My parents owned one in July 1969 because my Mum got my sister and I out of bed around 11pm to watch men walking on the surface of the Moon.

From 1969 until the late 1990s looking at screens with text and pictures didn't take up much time in my life. It was still only television, the box on legs that cost a lot of money and sat in the lounge room with all the chairs faced toward it. Then the dream of an American boy called Bill Gates that everybody should have a PC started getting actualised everywhere. I bought my teen son an Atari and a Commodore 64 because he would be left behind in the future if he didn't know how to use the technology.

Tangled Webs I've woven

"Values" and "Codes of Conduct" as cudgels to knock ya teeth out.

 I wrote twice to the Surface Design Association seeking to find out why I had been removed from the Holding Space Zoom seminar, Dec 3^rd and 7^th. They did not respond so on the 8^th of December I decided to become a member and paid US$75 for a years membership. After receiving confirmation of membership I was unable to actually activate my account for the next few days through some sort of technical problem that I had to email them about several times, asking for help. On December 13^th I included the Executive Director of the SDA, Karena Bennett, in my email explaining I couldn’t activate my account and a few hours later I was sent a special login link that allowed me to do so. In the next few days I put some images of my art onto my profile page and provided promotional information for my upcoming exhibition “Garb Age”, April 1^st – 23^rd, 2023. I still hadn’t gotten any response to the emails I’d sent seeking to find out why I couldn’t participate in the Holding Space seminar.

On Dec 15 I posted a couple of messages on the SDA Facebook page, asking when the transcript for the Zoom meeting would be released. The messages were published about an hour apart and both disappeared within a few minutes.

On Dec 16^th I sent this email to the SDA, cc-ed to Karena Bennett, Ilana Short the Membership Manager and to the Equity, Access and Integration Committee.

Hi, I’m wondering if theres a process to make a complaint how I’ve been denied equity, access and inclusion within SDA?

I’ve sent at least 3 queries by email, since December 3^rd to find out why I was I intentionally removed from participating in the international Zoom seminar “Holding Space: Unraveling Appropriation in Fiber Art”, but none of my messages seeking clarification over that issue have been acknowledged.

Two comments on the SDA Facebook page were removed in the last 24 hours when I asked if the transcript to the seminar is available yet. I believe I may have been treated in this disrespectful way due to my racial identity. Can you advise what recourse there is to follow up in finding out why my dismissal in this way has been acceptable? Should I be prepared to be treated like this ongoing by the SDA into the future?

As an aside, I value to be involved in the international discourse about appropriation in art. I am a textile artist who had 14 images of my artworks appropriated and crude reproductions, in the tens of thousands, were mass manufactured for the profit of a China based business. It occurred over 2 years and I was powerless to stop it but I learned a great deal about how to cope as an individual with being exploited, unheard and literally robbed.

regards

In less than 24 hours I received this reply from Karena Bennett

To which I immediately replied

Hi Karena

Thank you for your very prompt response. 

I've attached a screenshot of the advice I was given by Ilana Short regarding a recording of the seminar becoming publicly available. 

As SDA "values" are clearly applied only to select members that meet your fanciful criteria of being sufficiently oppressed I cannot say I'm particularly disturbed to be given the bums rush. When I was speculating joining your organisation and asked around amongst textile artists I know in Australia/New Zealand/USA they uniformly curled the lip in disdain and suggested the organisation has lost its previous prestige. One person prominent in Australian textile art (I won't name) didn't even realise she is still listed as a member. Regrettably for SDA it seems the era of virtue signalling equity, access and inclusion has attracted a lower quality of artisan. Feelings of being oppressed and aggrieved do not always align with talent and vision.

Go woke, go broke. If you take seriously the extremist babblings of Social Justice warriors like Emily Ito the SDA will likely continue losing members and its inexorable slide into obscurity. She is not even an artist, just an angry woman with identity problems. If discourse is censored the art will become visual dead dogma.

Thanks for the refund

Consequently, 2 weeks after Holding Space:Unraveling Appropriation in Fiber Art, I still don't know what claims Emily Ito is making about cultural appropriation. Its bizarre that people are actively preventing me from finding out! Its my strongly help opinion that any activist whose argument cannot be publicly critiqued by the community they are talking about then their argument is likely weak and flawed. I have been writing for years why I think Emily Ito does not have a credible opinion on what is genuinely cultural appropriation. I think her fatuous argument is damaging the textile art community, both the hobbyists and professional artists. 

Ito is a Critical Social Justice activist, not an artist. Any arts organisations (ie SDA) - who offer their resources to platform social justice ideologues for expounding political opinions about how visual artists should be allowed to express themselves; who are demanding to set parameters on what should be regarded as acceptable or unacceptable expression for artists - any such arts organisation has seriously confused the priority of their mission. Their mission is empower artists to free and provocative expression. Healthy societies benefit from visual artists challenging mainstream ways of seeing things. That the SDA has allowed itself to be captured by Critical Social Justice and its regressive agenda will lead to it endorsing and teaching its young inductees that there must be limits on what artists are allowed to do, say and produce.

Woke ideology (Critical Social Justice) turns everything it touches to shit. Its modus operandi is to divide every group of people into the haves (privileged) and the have nots (oppressed). Then they encourage the polarised to club each other senseless in the name of diversity, inclusion and equity (DIE).

Adult Human Female

This is a link to the documentary "Adult Human Female"

Its the film Trans Gender Ideologues don't want anybody to see. 

You may need to watch it secretly in case somebody who really, truly believes men can become women tells you you are a bigot and transphobe and tries to get you sacked from your job for wrongthink. 

ADULT HUMAN FEMALE

Coming to your town soon

I had to read this a few paragraphs at a time because something would start shaking deep inside of me and I'd be crying so hard I couldn't read the text.

I was so wrong when I thought 2nd Wave Feminism had left Womens Rights well set up for the 21stC. Critical Social Justice Theory and its bastard enforcer, Trans Gender Ideology has been unleashed to remind women we are not free of male oppression.

This is another piece of the backlash.

https://open.substack.com/pub/mandystadtmiller/p/rabbitholed-78-dana-rivers-is-the?r=jgqvg&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

 

I just made another Woke Victim Years ago, specifically on May 23, 2019, I responded to an item that was going around the internet sewist world about cultural appropriation. I wrote many blog posts reacting to it throughout 2019-20 and all the posts are still here on my blog. The writer I reacted to was Emily Ito, an American woman who lives in San Francisco whose mother is Japanese. Emilys mother married an American man and emigrated to live in the United States with her husband in the mid 60s, where Emily was born. My first blog post in response was May 23, then they go on for months after that. I spent hours and days researching and carefully laying out my argument why I disagreed with Itos proposition that a white person describing a garment they had made as a "kimono" was not an example of cultural appropriation. My opinions outraged many people who didn't agree with my view that calling a garment made by a non Japanese person a kimono was not cultural appropriation. Many readers responded that that was an opinion that could only be held by a white person who was a racist. I hoped that I could get a response and have a discussion from any one of the 3 anti-racist activists I quoted numerous times in the series of blogs I wrote, the people being Emily Ito, Aja Barber and Makiko Hastings. I was naïve enough at that time to believe that at least one of them would inevitably enter into a discussion….However, as at 3/12/2022 the only response I’ve ever had is to be blocked from all their social media. I tried several times to get some engagement by seeking out the social media platforms where the 3 women published because I’ve been a textile artist for many decades and as a person in that community who is directly affected by arguments about culture and appropriation it was important to me to know the prevailing zeitgeist. I became so frustrated by the wall of silence over the next few months that eventually I intentionally named one of my PDF sewing patterns the “Sencha Kimono”, hoping that would get some interaction going. (Sencha being the Japanese word for a tea ceremony and a play on the English word “Censor”). Meantime around 5 or 6 other independent pattern publishers on the internet were publicly shamed into removing the descriptor “kimono” from patterns they had published prior to Itos polemic. My name and base reputation as a vile and racist whitey must have been passed around the internet sewing world because I was subsequently blocked from more than 40 Instagram groups I’d belonged to and had the curious experience of sometimes trying to find an IG page through a link, and finding I was blocked in advance. My micro Etsy enterprise where I sell my sewing patterns was affected, sales dropping about 30% over a year and one woman asked for a refund when she realized she had given her $18 to a racist monster.  My Etsy Shop In 2021 I was also blocked from Atsushi Futatsuyas IG, “Sashiko Stories” for objecting to being told I was privileged because I’m a white woman. Atsushi is a good friend of Ito and it was apparent from the stuff he was writing about cultural appropriation and theories of white supremacy that Ito had a strong influence on his world view. Atsushi has also muted my comments from being seen on his YouTube channel. He hosts a weekly chat while stitching on YT that I regularly join but the other women who follow it every week are unaware of my presence as my comments are invisible on the livechat. Six months ago I asked Atsushi to unmute me but he refused to do so. I was only ever briefly on Itos IG – Little_Kotos_Words, in 2019, literally for one minute and one message before she blocked me (cannot provide a link obviously). I was blocked from Aja Barbers IG and in 2020 she even demanded I leave her Patreon following, despite being a paying subscriber and only ever having made one public post there (entirely milquetoast and nothing in the least bit offensive), in which she recognized my name. Ito and Barber describe themselves as Critical Social Justice activists. Barber published a book about the wastefulness of the fashion industry in 2021 that I read and liked very much. Both are regularly featured in podcasts and publications. In 2019 I discovered Barber on Twitter and wrote her a half joking message about getting into her echo chamber and she not only immediately blocked me but wrote a defamatory and inflammatory response to her followers (250,000) that I was stalking her, threatening her safety and that she was terrified (incidentally she was well aware I live in Australia and she lives in the UK). This bought a rather ugly pile-on to my IG page (550 followers) to such a distressing degree that I closed my account and stayed off Instagram for a month. In 2020 Barber also published a half hour video on her IG, never mentioning my name, but referring to a racist woman who was stalking and bullying her and making numerous sneering and disparaging comments about the hateful personality of the person. It disappeared a few months later. So that is a bit of history about my interactions with Ito and Barber.  I have no interest in them as individuals. They appeared in my international sewist community about 4 years ago talking political theories about race, appropriation and oppression, and lots of other ideas straight out of Critical Social Justice Theory. I just want to engage with their influential political ideas on a public platform to discuss and interact. However both seem to act as if I am personally attacking them and neither are reluctant to imply that in public. How I made Ito look like a victim today and how the Woke will play along. There is a textile art organization based in the USA called the Surface Design Association I haven’t been following their IG but until about 6 years ago I did subscribe to their magazine. Their IG has 20,600 followers on social media  and I noticed that more than 70 of the people who follow me also sub to the SDA. About 5 days ago I saw promoted on my IG feed that the SDA were having an open Zoom seminar called Holding Space: Unraveling Appropriation in Fiber Art and that there were 3 contributing people on the panel and that one of them was Emily Ito. I’m always curious what she has to say about textile art and appropriation so I joined up.  The meeting was scheduled to launch at 11am on 3/12/2022 and I duly signed in. The moderator was waiting for all the attendees to log in when I dropped out. A message came up that I had been removed. At first this seemed perplexing and I thought some sort of tech glitch might have occurred so I tried to log back in a couple of times to no avail. Then it occurred to me it may have been intentional so I switched email addresses and logged back in with success, much to my amazement. However that only lasted a minute before I got ousted again. It was apparent I had been ejected from the Zoom conference without explanation. The Zoom notification message that I had been "removed" was correct. I find this really remarkable. I have an opinion, a point of view that I feel I’m entitled to express within an international craft community I’ve been a part of for decades.  Ito isn’t a textile artist, she talks about learning to sew her own clothes beginning perhaps 2 years ago. She is an activist, a person who puts her politics out into the world and tries to influence people. But she won’t debate, she won’t discuss and she doesn’t interact.  I’m not sure why SDA kicked me out, whether it was at her behest, or perhaps the horribleness of a point of view I have has even seeped into their ears. But it seems crazy to me. I joined the conference out of good faith curiosity to hear what activists and other artists are saying about cultural appropriation in textile art. Dog knows, I've heard it often enough that I need to “educate” myself. The Woke have often commented they resent doing my emotional labour for me so I was expending my own time to find out what they feel I don’t understand. How bizarre that they don’t want to let me hear what I should know. In truth, I didn’t intend to ask anything or make any comment at all, I was there to listen to what their current views and claims are.  The upshot is it will all have to remain a mystery so I’ll just go on believing what I already believe until I hear a more convincing case argued. Ito, I presume will be “terrified” in a similar manner to what Barber claimed and perhaps feeling she has been stalked and harmed.  I just stay cancelled along with having another crime to add to my pantheon. Postscript: If anybody attended the SDA conference and a transcript or video recording is available I'd be glad to find out what was discussed.

Lucy Lou made a coat

Part 2 Zambeesi commission

Part 1, Zambeesi commission