Fabrics + Mobiles – by Caitlin Stockwell and Kaitlin Keufler’s

“This project of textiles and mobiles was created in the context of Business Associations Law 315. In this class, the students were asked to respond in some form to J.K. Gibson-Graham’s book Take Back the Economy. This particular project is an engagement with taking back work; taking back economy. And the two students who worked on this together took as their question tracking the relationship between majority and minority worlds through fabrics and through women’s work. So, in these two documents, if I can call them that, . . . the book and the mobile, they sought to understand what would be the realtionships between the fabrics we buy and the places that they are produced. On the mobile, what you see is beads representing the distance that the fabric in question travelled from the place of its origin to Canada. So you see various lengths of distance as well as the sizes of paper representing what proportion of fabric produced by that country enters the Canadian market. What is also interesting here is thinking about the ways in which those relations are invisible to the consumer; the ways in which . . . it is very hard to locate the actual locations between the women who produce them and very often the women who purchase them or wear them.”