Lorinda Cramer, Needlework & Women’s Identity in Colonial Australia

Westchester County, New York. Wells takes issue with the shift from tapestry to textile or fibre art as a feminist art form, suggesting that previous feminist scholars, such as Rozsika Parker, deliberately overlooked tapestries from the post-war period in favour of promoting traditionally domestic crafts, such as embroidery. For Parker, the subject of embroidery offered greater analysis of domestic life, whereas tapestry was considered a public art and less likely to form part of a feminist critique. But the complexity of why feminist practitioners intervened in this history is not fully addressed and other scholars needed referencing at this point. There is a passing citation to the work of Magdalena Abakanowicz (p. 217) but Western tapestry has nothing in common with the ‘loom thinking’ (working fibre directly on a loom) practices of Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and the former Yugoslavia. There were different modernisms in operation in post-Second World War Eastern Europe. Nonetheless the discussion of Helen Frankenthaler’s abstract paintings, through a tapestry project commissioned for the Temple of Aaron Synagogue (1956) and woven in Felletin, France, is both illuminating and joyously illustrated. Abstraction and tapestry fitted like a glove despite the American critic Clement Greenberg’s distaste for decoration in art (pp. 191–202). The section on Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party Project (1979) repositions the weavers, who produced the six tapestry banners at the San Francisco Tapestry workshop, as fully credited collaborators, something Lurçat never did.